o Erasmus--but there is some reason to suppose that they
were musical. He urged, too, that it was useless to hope the Bishop
could make much progress in a month or two with such a language as
Greek, over which Grocin had spent two years in Italy, and Linacre,
Latimer, and Erasmus himself had laboured for many years: it would be
much better to send to Italy for some one who could reside for a long
time in the Bishop's household.

Though he remained faithful to Oxford, Latimer in his later years held
two livings near Chipping Campden: in one, Weston-sub-Edge, he rebuilt
his parsonage-house and left his initials W.L. in the stonework, in
the other, Saintbury, there is a contemporary medallion of him in the
East window, showing the tall, thin figure which George Lily
describes.

At the time of Erasmus' first visit to England, 1499, London was far
more a centre of the new intellectual life than either Oxford or
Cambridge. He rejoiced in his first meeting with Colet, and in their
walks in Oxford gardens in the soft October sunshine; his Prior at St.
Mary's was benign and helpful; and he found a young compatriot, John
Sixtin, of Bolsward in East Friesland, studying law, and engaged with
him in a contest of that arid elegance which the taste of the age
still demanded. But in London he found Grocin at his City living,
ready to lend him books, and perhaps already contemplating those
lectures delivered two years later, on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy of
Dionysius, which brought him to such a surprising conclusion--a denial
of the attribution of them to Dionysius the Areopagite, which in
agreement with Colet he had set out to prove. In London was Linacre,
just returned from Venice, full of Aldus' Greek Aristotle; to a
supplementary volume of which he had sent a translation of Proclus'
Sphere, a mathematical work then highly esteemed. He had been working
on Aristotelian commentators, and was soon to lecture on the
_Meteorologica_--a course which More, who was working for the Bar in
London, attended. More himself not long afterwards lectured publicly
in London on Augustine's _de Ciuitate Dei_, also a favourite work with
the humanists. William Lily, returned from his pilgrimage, was at work
perhaps already as a schoolmaster in London; and vying with More in
translating the Greek Anthology into Latin elegiacs. Bernard Andreas,
the blind poet of Toulouse, after trying his fortune in vain at
Oxford, had insinuated himself into Henry VI