gland, a bishopric in Sicily, always
half jocularly regretting the good chances he missed in former times,
jesting about his pursuit of fortune, lamenting about his 'spouse,
execrable poverty, which even yet I have not succeeded in shaking off my
shoulders'. And, after all, ever more the victim of his own restlessness
than of the disfavour of fate. He is now fifty years old and still he
is, as he says, 'sowing without knowing what I shall reap'. This,
however, only refers to his career, not to his life-work.

In the course of 1515 a new and promising patron, John le Sauvage,
Chancellor of Brabant, had succeeded in procuring for him the title of
councillor of the prince, the youthful Charles V. In the beginning of
1516 he was nominated: it was a mere title of honour, promising a yearly
pension of 200 florins, which, however, was paid but irregularly. To
habilitate himself as a councillor of the prince, Erasmus wrote the
_Institutio Principis Christiani_, a treatise about the education of a
prince, which in accordance with Erasmus's nature and inclination deals
rather with moral than with political matters, and is in striking
contrast with that other work, written some years earlier, _il Principe_
by Machiavelli.

When his work at Basle ceased for the time being, in the spring of 1516,
Erasmus journeyed to the Netherlands. At Brussels he met the chancellor,
who, in addition to the prince's pension, procured him a prebend at
Courtray, which, like the English benefice mentioned above, was
compounded for by money payments. At Antwerp lived one of the great
friends who helped in his support all his life: Peter Gilles, the young
town clerk, in whose house he stayed as often as he came to Antwerp.
Peter Gilles is the man who figures in More's _Utopia_ as the person in
whose garden the sailor tells his experiences; it was in these days that
Gilles helped Dirck Maertensz, at Louvain, to pass the first edition of
the _Utopia_ through the press. Later Quentin Metsys was to paint him
and Erasmus, joined in a diptych; a present for Thomas More and for us a
vivid memorial of one of the best things Erasmus ever knew: this triple
friendship.

In the summer of 1516 Erasmus made another short trip to England. He
stayed with More, saw Colet again, also Warham, Fisher, and the other
friends. But it was not to visit old friends that he went there. A
pressing and delicate matter impelled him. Now that prebends and church
dignities began to