'Where is gladness or repose?
Wherever I turn my eyes I only see disaster and harshness. And in such a
bustle and clamour about me you wish me to find leisure for the work of
the Muses?'

Real leisure Erasmus was never to find during his life. All his reading,
all his writing, he did hastily, _tumultuarie_, as he calls it
repeatedly. Yet he must nevertheless have worked with intensest
concentration and an incredible power of assimilation. Whilst staying
with the bishop he visited the monastery of Groenendael near Brussels,
where in former times Ruysbroeck wrote. Possibly Erasmus did not hear
the inmates speak of Ruysbroeck and he would certainly have taken little
pleasure in the writings of the great mystic. But in the library he
found the works of St. Augustine and these he devoured. The monks of
Groenendael were surprised at his diligence. He took the volumes with
him even to his bedroom.

He occasionally found time to compose at this period. At Halsteren, near
Bergen-op-Zoom, where the bishop had a country house, he revised the
_Antibarbari_, begun at Steyn, and elaborated it in the form of a
dialogue. It would seem as if he sought compensation for the agitation
of his existence in an atmosphere of idyllic repose and cultured
conversation. He conveys us to the scene (he will afterwards use it
repeatedly) which ever remained the ideal pleasure of life to him: a
garden or a garden house outside the town, where in the gladness of a
fine day a small number of friends meet to talk during a simple meal or
a quiet walk, in Platonic serenity, about things of the mind. The
personages whom he introduces, besides himself, are his best friends.
They are the valued and faithful friend whom he got to know at Bergen,
James Batt, schoolmaster and afterwards also clerk of that town, and his
old friend William Hermans of Steyn, whose literary future he continued
somewhat to promote. William, arriving unexpectedly from Holland, meets
the others, who are later joined by the Burgomaster of Bergen and the
town physician. In a lightly jesting, placid tone they engage in a
discussion about the appreciation of poetry and literature--Latin
literature. These are not incompatible with true devotion, as barbarous
dullness wants us to believe. A cloud of witnesses is there to prove it,
among them and above all St. Augustine, whom Erasmus had studied
recently, and St. Jerome, with whom Erasmus had been longer acquainted
and whose mind was, indee