should remain true to himself.' In Francis of Busleiden,
Archbishop of Besancon, he lost at about the same time a prospective new
patron. He still felt shut out from Paris, Cologne and England by the
danger of the plague.

In the late summer of 1502 he went to Louvain, 'flung thither by the
plague,' he says. The university of Louvain, established in 1425 to wean
the Netherlands in spiritual matters from Paris, was, at the beginning
of the sixteenth century, one of the strongholds of theological
tradition, which, however, did not prevent the progress of classical
studies. How else should Adrian of Utrecht, later pope but at that time
Dean of Saint Peter's and professor of theology, have forthwith
undertaken to get him a professorship? Erasmus declined the offer,
however, 'for certain reasons,' he says. Considering his great distress,
the reasons must have been cogent indeed. One of them which he mentioned
is not very clear to us: 'I am here so near to Dutch tongues which know
how to hurt much, it is true, but have not learned to profit any one'.
His spirit of liberty and his ardent love of the studies to which he
wanted to devote himself entirely, were, no doubt, his chief reasons for
declining.

But he had to make a living. Life at Louvain was expensive and he had no
regular earnings. He wrote some prefaces and dedicated to the Bishop of
Arras, Chancellor of the University, the first translation from the
Greek: some _Declamationes_ by Libanius. When in the autumn of 1503
Philip le Beau was expected back in the Netherlands from his journey to
Spain Erasmus wrote, with sighs of distaste, a panegyric to celebrate
the safe return of the prince. It cost him much trouble. 'It occupies me
day and night,' says the man who composed with such incredible facility,
when his heart was in the work. 'What is harder than to write with
aversion; what is more useless than to write something by which we
unlearn good writing?' It must be acknowledged that he really flattered
as sparingly as possible; the practice was so repulsive to him that in
his preface he roundly owned that, to tell the truth, this whole class
of composition was not to his taste.

At the end of 1504 Erasmus was back at Paris, at last. Probably he had
always meant to return and looked upon his stay at Louvain as a
temporary exile. The circumstances under which he left Louvain are
unknown to us, because of the almost total lack of letters of the year
1504. In any cas