es, and liked to be free in his
spending. He needed a horse to ride, and a boy to attend upon him. In
consequence we hear a good many complaints of penury, all through his
three years at Cambridge, 1511 to 1514.

It is worth while to examine in detail the work that he completed
during this period on the Letters of Jerome and the New Testament. One
afternoon in Oxford in 1499 he had had a long discussion with Colet,
and in the course of it had argued strongly against a point of view
which Colet had derived from Jerome. Whether this set him on to read
Jerome again--he was already quite familiar with him--is not clear;
but a year later, when he was hard at work in Paris, he was already
engaged upon correcting the text of Jerome, and adding a commentary,
being specially interested in the Letters. So far did his admiration
carry him that he writes to a friend, 'I am perhaps biased; but when I
compare Cicero's style with Jerome's, I seem to feel something lacking
in the prince of eloquence himself'. After he left Paris in 1501, we
hear no more of Jerome till 1511. It may therefore fairly be argued
that his early work was done on manuscripts found in Paris libraries,
very likely those of the great abbeys of St. Victor or St.
Germain-des-Pres.

Subsequently, in Cambridge, he again had access to manuscripts and
completed his recension of the Letters. Robert Aldridge, a young
Fellow of King's, afterwards Bishop of Carlisle, speaks of working
with him at Jerome in Queens', probably helping him in collation. An
early catalogue of the Queens' library does not contain any mention of
Jerome, so that Erasmus had probably borrowed his manuscripts from
elsewhere--perhaps, like those of the New Testament, from the Chapter
Library at St. Paul's; for later on, when the book was in the press,
he returned from Basle to England to consult the manuscripts again,
and there is no reason to suppose that during his brief stay--not a
full month--he went outside London. If this surmise were correct, the
destruction of St. Paul's library in the fires of 1561 and 1666 would
explain why so little has been discovered about the manuscripts which
Erasmus had for his Jerome. He himself, in his prefaces, gives little
indication of them, beyond saying that they were very old and
mutilated, and that some of them were written in Lombardic and Gothic
characters. Perhaps some day a student of Jerome will arise who will
be able to throw light on the matter from