ich
unwittingly influences our mode of expression, a luxury that only the
highest spirits can bear with impunity.

The link between Erasmus and book-printing was Latin. Without his
incomparable Latinity his position as an author would have been
impossible. The art of printing undoubtedly furthered the use of Latin.
It was the Latin publications which in those days promised success and a
large sale for a publisher, and established his reputation, for they
were broadcast all over the world. The leading publishers were
themselves scholars filled with enthusiasm for humanism. Cultured and
well-to-do people acted as proof-readers to printers; such as Peter
Gilles, the friend of Erasmus and More, the town clerk of Antwerp, who
corrected proof-sheets for Dirck Maertensz. The great printing-offices
were, in a local sense, too, the foci of intellectual intercourse. The
fact that England had lagged behind, thus far, in the evolution of the
art of printing, contributed not a little, no doubt, to prevent Erasmus
from settling there, where so many ties held and so many advantages
allured him.

To find a permanent place of residence was, indeed, and apart from this
fact, very hard for him. Towards the end of 1508 he accepted the post of
tutor in rhetorics to the young Alexander Stewart, a natural son of
James IV of Scotland, and already, in spite of his youth, Archbishop of
Saint Andrews, now a student at Padua. The danger of war soon drove them
from upper Italy to Siena. Here Erasmus obtained leave to visit Rome. He
arrived there early in 1509, no longer an unknown canon from the
northern regions but a celebrated and honoured author. All the charms of
the Eternal City lay open to him and he must have felt keenly gratified
by the consideration and courtesy with which cardinals and prelates,
such as Giovanni de' Medici, afterwards Leo X, Domenico Grimani, Riario
and others, treated him. It seems that he was even offered some post in
the curia. But he had to return to his youthful archbishop with whom he
thereupon visited Rome again, incognito, and afterwards travelled in the
neighbourhood of Naples. He inspected the cave of the Sibylla of Cumae,
but what it meant to him we do not know. This entire period following
his departure from Padua and all that follows till the spring of
1511--in certain respects the most important part of his life--remains
unrecorded in a single letter that has come down to us. Here and there
he has occasion