ued an audience of 300
for three hours on end on the power of eloquence, and stimulated by
the sight of such a gathering, worked himself up in his peroration,
until he believed himself to be a second Cicero. His hearers perhaps
did not agree. Anyway, Butzbach is the only person who mentions him,
and he would have preferred a little less eloquence and a little more
medicine; for the Abbot, instead of recovering, died under the hands
of the new Cicero in two days.

Besides lecturing at the university, young men also maintained
themselves by working for the printers, correcting proof-sheets and
composing complimentary prefaces and verses. Another service which
they could render to both printers and authors was to give public
'interpretations', as they were called, of new books on publication,
for the purpose of advertisement. These interpretations probably took
place at the printer's office, and were of the nature of a review,
describing the book's contents; and they were doubtless repeated at
frequent intervals before new groups of likely purchasers.

Erasmus, however, had been sent to Paris to take a degree in Theology,
and his patrons expected him to occupy himself with this. When he
returned from Holland in 1496 he could not face again the rigours of
Montaigu, and so he took shelter in a boarding-house kept by a
termagant woman--'pessima mulier' the bursar of the German nation, her
landlords, called her when she would not pay her rent--, the wife of a
minor court official. So long as his supplies lasted, he kept strictly
to his work; but when the Bishop failed him, he was obliged to support
himself, and took to private teaching. Two of his pupils were young
men from Lubeck, who were under the care of a teacher from their own
part of the world, Augustine Vincent, a budding scholar, who
afterwards published an edition of Virgil, but who as yet was glad to
be helped by Erasmus. Another pair came from England, one a kinsman
of John Fisher, and were in the charge of a morose North-countryman.
In great poverty, Erasmus made his way somehow, occasionally writing
little treatises for his pupils, on a method of study, on
letter-writing--an important art in those days--, a paraphrase of the
_Elegantiae_ of Valla; and finally, one of his best-known works, the
Colloquies, had its origin in a little composition of this period,
which he refers to as 'sermones quosdam quotidianos quibus in
congressibus et conuiuiis vtimur'--a few f