'Now (on hearing that Henry VIII had ascended
the throne) surely all bitterness must have suddenly left your soul,'
Mountjoy writes to him in 1509, possibly through the pen of Ammonius.

The years after his return to France were difficult ones. He was in
great need of money and was forced to do what he could, as a man of
letters, with his talents and knowledge. He had again to be the _homo
poeticus_ or _rhetoricus_. He writes polished letters full of mythology
and modest mendicity. As a poet he had a reputation; as a poet he could
expect support. Meanwhile the elevating picture of his theological
activities remained present before his mind's eye. It nerves him to
energy and perseverance. 'It is incredible', he writes to Batt, 'how my
soul yearns to finish all my works, at the same time becoming somewhat
proficient in Greek, and afterwards to devote myself entirely to the
sacred learning after which my soul has been hankering for a long time.
I am in fairly good health, so I shall have to strain every nerve this
year (1501) to get the work we gave the printer published, and by
dealing with theological problems, to expose our cavillers, who are very
numerous, as they deserve. If three more years of life are granted me, I
shall be beyond the reach of envy.'

Here we see him in a frame of mind to accomplish great things, though
not merely under the impulse of true devotion. Already he sees the
restoration of genuine divinity as his task; unfortunately the effusion
is contained in a letter in which he instructs the faithful Batt as to
how he should handle the Lady of Veere in order to wheedle money out of
her.

For years to come the efforts to make a living were to cause him almost
constant tribulations and petty cares. He had had more than enough of
France and desired nothing better than to leave it. Part of the year
1500 he spent at Orleans. Adversity made him narrow. There is the story
of his relations with Augustine Vincent Caminade, a humanist of lesser
rank (he ended as syndic of Middelburg), who took young men as lodgers.
It is too long to detail here, but remarkable enough as revealing
Erasmus's psychology, for it shows how deeply he mistrusted his friends.
There are also his relations with Jacobus Voecht, in whose house he
evidently lived gratuitously and for whom he managed to procure a rich
lodger in the person of an illegitimate brother of the Bishop of
Cambray. At this time, Erasmus asserts, the bishop (Antima