e, he hoped that at Paris he would sooner be able to
attain his great end of devoting himself entirely to the study of
theology. 'I cannot tell you, dear Colet,' he writes towards the end of
1504, 'how I hurry on, with all sails set, to holy literature; how I
dislike everything that keeps me back, or retards me. But the disfavour
of Fortune, who always looks at me with the same face, has been the
reason why I have not been able to get clear of those vexations. So I
returned to France with the purpose, if I cannot solve them, at any rate
of ridding myself of them in one way or another. After that I shall
devote myself, with all my heart, to the _divinae literae_, to give up
the remainder of my life to them.' If only he can find the means to work
for some months entirely for himself and disentangle himself from
profane literature. Can Colet not find out for him how matters stand
with regard to the proceeds of the hundred copies of the _Adagia_ which,
at one time, he sent to England at his own expense? The liberty of a few
months may be bought for little money.

There is something heroic in Erasmus scorning to make money out of his
facile talents and enviable knowledge of the humanities, daring
indigence so as to be able to realize his shining ideal of restoring
theology.

It is remarkable that the same Italian humanist who in his youth had
been his guide and example on the road to pure Latinity and classic
antiquity, Lorenzo Valla, by chance became his leader and an outpost in
the field of critical theology. In the summer of 1504, hunting in the
old library of the Premonstratensian monastery of Parc, near Louvain
('in no preserves is hunting a greater delight'), he found a manuscript
of Valla's _Annotationes_ on the New Testament. It was a collection of
critical notes on the text of the Gospels, the Epistles and Revelation.
That the text of the Vulgate was not stainless had been acknowledged by
Rome itself as early as the thirteenth century. Monastic orders and
individual divines had set themselves to correct it, but that
purification had not amounted to much, in spite of Nicholas of Lyra's
work in the fourteenth century.

It was probably the falling in with Valla's _Annotationes_ which led
Erasmus, who was formerly more inspired with the resolution to edit
Jerome and to comment upon Paul (he was to do both at a later date), to
turn to the task of taking up the New Testament as a whole, in order to
restore it in its pu