' in his friend's popular 'Handbook of the Christian Soldier.' When
they reached the hall however Colet plumped gloomily down by Warham's
side, neither eating nor drinking nor speaking in spite of the
Archbishop's good-humoured attempt to draw him into conversation. It was
only by starting the new topic of a comparison of ages that the
Archbishop was at last successful; and when dinner was over Colet's
ill-temper had utterly fled. Erasmus saw him draw aside an old man who
had shared their board, and engage in the friendliest greeting. "What a
fortunate fellow you are!" began the impetuous Dean, as the two friends
stepped again into their boat; "what a tide of good-luck you bring with
you!" Erasmus, of course, protested (one can almost see the
half-earnest, half-humorous smile on his lip) that he was the most
unfortunate fellow on earth. He was at any rate a bringer of good
fortune to his friends, the Dean retorted; one friend at least he had
saved from an unseemly outbreak of passion. At the Archbishop's table,
in fact, Colet had found himself placed opposite to an uncle with whom
he had long waged a bitter family feud, and it was only the singular
chance which had brought him thither fresh from the wholesome lessons of
the 'Handbook' that had enabled the Dean to refrain at the moment from
open quarrel, and at last to get such a full mastery over his temper as
to bring about a reconciliation with his kinsman. Colet was certainly
very lucky in his friend's lessons, but he was perhaps quite as
fortunate in finding a host so patient and good-tempered as Archbishop
Warham.

Primate and scholar were finally separated at last by the settlement of
Erasmus at Basel, but the severance brought no interruption to their
friendship. "England is my last anchor," Erasmus wrote bitterly to a
rich German prelate; "if that goes, I must beg." The anchor held as long
as Warham lived. Years go by, but the Primate is never tired of new
gifts and remembrances to the brave, sensitive scholar at whose heels
all the ignorance and bigotry of Europe was yelping. Sometimes indeed he
was luckless in his presents; once he sent a horse to his friend, and,
in spite of the well-known proverb about looking such a gift in the
mouth, got a witty little snub for his pains. "He is no doubt a good
steed at bottom," Erasmus gravely confesses, "but it must be owned he is
not over-handsome; however he is at any rate free from all mortal sins,
with the trifling e