I's confidence, and was
now attached to the court as tutor to Prince Arthur--an office from
which Linacre attempted unsuccessfully to oust him--and busy with his
history of the king's reign: a project which enjoyed royal favour, and
was the forerunner of Polydore Vergil's creditable essay towards a
critical history of England.

When Erasmus was again invited to England in 1505-6, the position had
not changed. He writes to a friend in Holland: 'There are in London
five or six men who are thorough masters of both Latin and Greek: even
in Italy I doubt that you would find their equals. Without wishing to
boast, it is a great pleasure to find that they think well of me.' To
Colet in the following year, when he had said farewell, he writes from
Paris: 'No place in the world has given me such friends as your City
of London: so true, so learned, so generous, so distinguished, so
unselfish, so numerous.' With the string of epithets we are not
concerned: the point to remark is that it is of London he writes, not
of either of the universities.

Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that Erasmus did not
at once accept Colet's proposition in 1499 that he should stay and
teach in Oxford. Whether provision was offered him or not, we do not
know: he might perhaps have stayed on by right at St. Mary's, but he
loved not the rule. We do know, however, that at Paris there certainly
was no provision for him. In quest of Greek, in quest of the proper
equipment for his life's work, he went back to the old precarious
existence, pupils and starvation, the dependence and the flattery that
he loathed. It is this last, indeed, that puts the sting into his
correspondence with Batt. That loyal friend, ever coaxing money out of
his complacent and generous patroness for dispatch to Paris, would
now and then ask for a letter to her, to make the claims of the absent
more vivid. At this Erasmus would boil over: 'Letters,' he writes,
'it's always letters. You seem to think I am made of adamant: or
perhaps that I have nothing else to do.' 'There is nothing I detest
more than these sycophantic epistles.' Well he might; for this is the
sort of thing he wrote.

You will remember that the Lady of Veere was named Anne of Borsselen.
A letter of Erasmus to her begins: 'Three Annas were known to the
ancients; the sister of Dido, whom the Muses of the Romans have
consecrated to immortality; the wife of Elkanah, with whose praises
Jewish records resou