lowed on to his pages, and so
they actually were printed.

The importance of Erasmus' time in Italy is, then, that he completed,
or at any rate published, the enlarged _Adagia_, his first
considerable work, a book which carried his name far and wide
throughout Europe, and won him fame amongst all who had pretensions to
scholarship. No one reads it to-day. Except the composition of the
schools, for which Erasmus is considered unclassical, there is little
Latin writing now; but in its youth the book had a great vogue, and
went through hundreds of reprints.

This second visit of Erasmus to Cambridge was under pleasant
conditions. Fisher was interested in his work, and having been until
recently President of Queens'--the foundation of Margaret of Anjou,
which Elizabeth Woodville had succoured, York coming to the rescue of
Lancaster--he was able without difficulty to secure rooms in college
for his protege. High up they are, at the head of a stair-case, where
undergraduates still cherish his name, and where his portrait--an
heirloom from one generation to another--may be seen surrounded by
prints of gentlemen in pink riding to hounds; quite a suitable
collocation for this very humanly minded scholar. Besides his own work
he lectured publicly for a few months. He began to teach Greek, and
lectured on the grammar of Chrysoloras. Finding that this did not
attract pupils, he changed to Gaza; which he evidently expected to be
more popular. But he did not persevere. If his position was public
(which is doubtful), there was no money to pay him for long; and it
is a sign of the state of the University, that he found it no use to
lecture on anything more advanced than grammar. The Schoolmen were
still strongly entrenched.

Besides teaching Greek he also lectured on Jerome's Letters and his
Apology against Ruffinus, books which, as we shall see, he was working
at privately. He is said to have held for a time the professorship of
Divinity founded in Cambridge, as in Oxford, in 1497 by the Lady
Margaret, but the records are inadequate; and here too it is possible
that his teaching was a private venture. He had no regular income
except a pension from Lord Mountjoy, to which in 1512 Warham added the
living of Aldington in Kent; and these were supplemented by occasional
gifts from friends, which he courted by dedicating to them
translations from Plutarch and Lucian, Chrysostom and Basil. But this
was not enough. He was free in his tast