cian, followed by others,
for Foxe; the _Hecuba_ and the _Iphigenia_ of Euripides for Warham. He
now also thought of publishing his letters.

Clearly his relations with Holland were not yet satisfactory. Servatius
did not reply to his letters. Erasmus ever felt hanging over him a
menace to his career and his liberty embodied in the figure of that
friend, to whom he was linked by so many silken ties, yonder in the
monastery of Steyn, where his return was looked forward to, sooner or
later, as a beacon-light of Christendom. Did the prior know of the papal
dispensation exempting Erasmus from the 'statutes and customs of the
monastery of Steyn in Holland, of the order of Saint Augustine?'
Probably he did. On 1 April 1506, Erasmus writes to him: 'Here in London
I am, it seems, greatly esteemed by the most eminent and erudite men of
all England. The king has promised me a curacy: the visit of the prince
necessitated a postponement of this business.'[8]

He immediately adds: 'I am deliberating again how best to devote the
remainder of my life (how much that will be, I do not know) entirely to
piety, to Christ. I see life, even when it is long, as evanescent and
dwindling; I know that I am of a delicate constitution and that my
strength has been encroached upon, not a little, by study and also,
somewhat, by misfortune. I see that no deliverance can be hoped from
study, and that it seems as if we had to begin over again, day after
day. Therefore I have resolved, content with my mediocrity (especially
now that I have learned as much Greek as suffices me), to apply myself
to meditation about death and the training of my soul. I should have
done so before and have husbanded the precious years when they were at
their best. But though it is a tardy husbandry that people practise when
only little remains at the bottom, we should be the more economical
accordingly as the quantity and quality of what is left diminishes.'

Was it a fit of melancholy which made Erasmus write those words of
repentance and renunciation? Was he surprised in the middle of the
pursuit of his life's aim by the consciousness of the vanity of his
endeavours, the consciousness, too, of a great fatigue? Is this the
deepest foundation of Erasmus's being, which he reveals for a moment to
his old and intimate friend? It may be doubted. The passage tallies very
ill with the first sentences of the letter, which are altogether
concerned with success and prospects. In a