of men.  Ascham in the Toxophilus (1545), when discussing the relaxations open to the scholar who has been ‘sore at his book’, urges that ’walking alone into the field hath no token of courage in it’.  But though this may have been true by that time in the immediate neighbourhood of English towns, it was not yet true abroad; for Thomas Starkey in his Dialogue (1538), almost as valuable a source as the Utopia, praises foreign cities with their resident nobles by comparison with English, which are neglected and dirty ’because gentlemen fly into the country to live, and let cities, castles and towns fall into ruin and decay’.

It is tantalizing, too, considering how abundant are Erasmus’ literary remains, that we get so little description of places from him.  He travelled far and wide, in the Low Countries, up and down the Rhine, through France, southwards to Rome and Naples.  He was a year in Venice, three years at Cambridge, eight years at Basle, six at Freiburg.  What precious information he might have given us about these places, which then as now were full of interesting buildings and treasures of art! what a mine of antiquarian detail, if he had expatiated occasionally!  But a meagre description of Constance, a word or two about Basle in narrating an explosion there, glimpses of Walsingham and Canterbury in his colloquy on pilgrimages—­that is almost all that can be culled from his works about the places he visited.  When he came to Oxford, Merton tower had been gladdening men’s eyes for scarcely fifty years, and the tower of Magdalen had just risen to rival its beauty; Duke Humfrey’s Library and the Divinity School were still in their first glory, and the monks of St. Frideswide were contemplating transforming the choir of their church into the splendid Perpendicular such as Bray had achieved at Westminster and Windsor for Henry VII.  But Erasmus tells us nothing of what he saw; only what he heard and said.  This lack of enjoyment in Nature, lack of interest in topography and archaeology, was probably personal to him.  It was not so with some of his friends.  More and Ellenbog, as we have seen, could feel the beauty in the night

      ‘Of cloudless climes and starry skies’.

Aleander in a diary records the exceptional brilliance of the planet Jupiter at the end of September 1513.  He pointed it out to his pupils in the College de la Marche at Paris, and together they remarked that its rays were strong enough to cast a shadow.  Ellenbog enjoyed the country, and Luther also was susceptible to its charms.  Budaeus had a villa to which he delighted to escape from Paris, and where he laid out a fine estate.  Beatus Rhenanus after thirty years retained impressions of Louis XII’s gardens at Tours and Blois and of a ‘hanging garden’ in Paris; and could write a detailed account of the Fugger palace at Augsburg with its art treasures.  Or think of the painters.  The Flemings of the fifteenth century had learnt from