glish hospitality, English manners--everything English
except the beer--equally pleased him. In the young London men--the
lawyers, the noblemen, even in some of the clergy--he found his own
passion for learning. Sir Thomas More, who was a few years younger than
himself, became his dearest friend; and Warham, afterwards Archbishop of
Canterbury--Fisher, afterwards Bishop of Rochester--Colet, the famous
Dean of St. Paul's--the great Wolsey himself--recognised and welcomed
the rising star of European literature.

Money flowed in upon him. Warham gave him a benefice in Kent, which was
afterwards changed to a pension. Prince Henry, when he became King,
offered him--kings in those days were not bad friends to
literature--Henry offered him, if he would remain in England, a house
large enough to be called a palace, and a pension which, converted into
our money, would be a thousand pounds a year.

Erasmus, however, was a restless creature, and did not like to be caged
or tethered. He declined the King's terms, but Mountjoy settled a
pension on him instead. He had now a handsome income, and he understood
the art of enjoying it. He moved about as he pleased--now to Cambridge,
now to Oxford, and, as the humour took him, back again to Paris; now
staying with Sir Thomas More at Chelsea, now going a pilgrimage with
Dean Colet to Becket's tomb at Canterbury--but always studying, always
gathering knowledge, and throwing it out again, steeped in his own
mother wit, in shining Essays or Dialogues, which were the delight and
the despair of his contemporaries.

Everywhere, in his love of pleasure, in his habits of thought, in his
sarcastic scepticism, you see the healthy, clever, well-disposed,
tolerant, epicurean, intellectual man of the world.

He went, as I said, with Dean Colet to Becket's tomb. At a shrine about
Canterbury he was shown an old shoe which tradition called the Saint's.
At the tomb itself, the great sight was a handkerchief which a monk took
from among the relics, and offered it to the crowd to kiss. The
worshippers touched it in pious adoration, with clasped hands and
upturned eyes. If the thing was genuine, as Erasmus observed, it had but
served for the archbishop to wipe his nose with--and Dean Colet, a
puritan before his time, looked on with eyes flashing scorn, and
scarcely able to keep his hands off the exhibitors. But Erasmus smiled
kindly, reflecting that mankind were fools, and in some form or other
would rema