the
case of a public man of his fame and position, and of whom so much is
otherwise known. From the autumn of 1509, when he returned from Italy
and wrote the Praise of Folly in More's house in Bucklersbury, until
April 1511, when he went to Paris to print it, Erasmus completely
disappears from view. He published nothing, no letter that he wrote
survives, we have no clue to his movements. If it had been any one
else, we might almost conjecture that, like Hermonymus, he was in
prison. It was just during this period that Cornelius Agrippa was in
London. If either had mentioned the other, we should have a spark to
illumine this singular belt of darkness.

When Erasmus returned to Cambridge in 1511, he was already familiar
with the field in which he was going to work; but the precise order in
which his scheme unfolded itself, whether the Greek text was his first
aim or an afterthought, is not clear, his utterances being perhaps
intentionally ambiguous. During these three years in Cambridge he
refers occasionally to the 'collation' and 'castigation' of the New
Testament, so that evidently he was engaged with the four Greek
manuscripts, which, according to an introduction in his first edition,
he had before him for his first recension. One of these has been
identified, the Leicester Codex written by Emmanuel of Constantinople,
which, as already mentioned, was with the Franciscans at Cambridge
early in the sixteenth century.

By 1514 he was ready. In the last three years he had completed Jerome
and the New Testament, and had also prepared for the press some of
Seneca's philosophical writings, from manuscripts at King's and
Peterhouse; besides lesser pieces of work. A difficulty arose about
the printing. In 1512 he had been in negotiation with Badius Ascensius
of Paris to undertake Jerome and a new edition of the _Adagia_. What
actually happened is not known. But in December 1513 he writes to an
intimate friend that he has been badly treated about the _Adagia_ by
an agent--a travelling bookseller, who acted as go-between for
printers and authors and public; that instead of taking them to Badius
and offering him the refusal, the knavish fellow had gone straight to
Basle and sold them, with some other work of Erasmus, to a printer
who had only just completed an edition of the _Adagia_. Erasmus'
indignation does not ring true. It is highly probable that he was in
search of a printer with greater resources than Badius, who as yet