nda morte_, a dialogue wrongly attributed to
Plato, which was a favourite in Renaissance days. Also he completed
the chief composition of his lifetime, the _De inuentione dialectica_,
a considerable treatise on rhetoric. His favourite books, Geldenhauer
tells us, were Pliny's Natural History, the younger Pliny's Letters,
Quintilian's _Institutio Oratoria_, and selections from Cicero and
Plato. These were his travelling library, carried with him wherever he
went; two of them, Pliny's Letters and Quintilian, he had copied out
with his own hand. Other books, as he acquired them, he planted out in
friends' houses as pledges of return.

In 1479 he left Italy and went home. On his way he stayed for some
months with the Bishop of Augsburg at Dillingen, on the Danube, and
there translated Lucian's _De non facile credendis delationibus_. A
manuscript of Homer sorely tempted him to stay on through the winter.
He felt that without Homer his knowledge of Greek was incomplete; and
he proposed to copy it out from beginning to end, or at any rate the
Iliad. But home called him, and he went on. At Spires, in quest of
manuscripts, he went with a friend to the cathedral library. He
describes it as not bad for Germany, though it contained nothing in
Greek, and only a few Latin manuscripts of any interest--a Livy and a
Pliny, very old, but much injured and the texts corrupt--and nothing
at all that could be called eloquence, that is to say, pure
literature.

When he had been a little while in Groningen, the town council
bethought them to turn his talents and learning to some account. He
was a fine figure of a man, who would make a creditable show in
conducting their business; and for composing the elegant Latin
epistles, which every respectable corporation felt bound to rise to on
occasions, no one was better equipped than he. He was retained as town
secretary, and in the four years of his service went on frequent
embassies. During the first year we hear of him visiting his father at
Siloe, and contracting a friendship with one of the nuns[1]; to whom
he afterwards sent a work of Eucherius, bishop of Lyons, which he had
found in a manuscript at Roermond. Twice he visited Brussels on
embassy to Maximilian; and in the next year he followed the Archduke's
court for several months, visiting Antwerp, and making the
acquaintance of Barbiriau, the famous musician. Maximilian offered him
the post of tutor to his children and Latin secretary to h