societies of Bruges and Lille when he was working in Belgian libraries; and on all sides men frankly acknowledged his intellectual pre-eminence as they marked his quiet readiness in debate and heard him pose the lecturers with acute questions.  By nature he was silent and absorbed, and often in company he would sit deaf to all questions, his elbows on the table and biting his nails.  But when roused he was at once captivating; and this unintended rudeness never lost him a friend.  There was a small band of true humanists, who, as Geldenhauer puts it, ’had begun to love purity of Latin style’; to them he was insensibly attracted, and spent with them over Cicero and Quintilian hours filched from the study of Aristotle.  Later in life he openly regretted having spent as much as seven years over the scholastic philosophy, which he had learnt to regard as profitless.

From 1468 to 1479 he was for the most part in Italy, except for occasional visits to the North, when we see him staying with his father at Siloe, and, in 1474, teaching Greek to Hegius at Emmerich.  Many positions were offered to him already; gifts such as his have not to stand waiting in the marketplace.  But his wits were not homely, and the world called him.  Before he could settle he must see many men and many cities, and learn what Italy had to teach him.

For the first part of his time there, until 1473, he was at Pavia studying law and rhetoric; but on his return from home in 1474 he went to Ferrara in order to enjoy the better opportunities for learning Greek afforded by the court of Duke Hercules of Este and its circle of learned men.  His description of the place is interesting:  ’The town is beautiful, and so are the women.  The University has not so many faculties as Pavia, nor are they so well attended; but literae humaniores seem to be in the very air.  Indeed, Ferrara is the home of the Muses—­and of Venus.’  One special delight to him was that the Duke had a fine organ, and he was able to indulge what he describes as his ‘old weakness for the organs’.  In October 1476, at the opening of the winter term of the University, the customary oration before the Duke was delivered by Rodolphus Agricola Phrysius.  His eloquence surprised the Italians, coming from so outlandish a person:  ’a Phrygian, I believe’, said one to another, with a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders.  But Agricola, with his chestnut-brown hair and blue eyes, was no Oriental; only a Frieslander from the North, whose cold climate to the superb Italians seemed as benumbing to the intellect as we consider that of the Esquimaux.

During this period Agricola translated Isocrates ad Demonicum and the Axiochus de contemnenda morte, a dialogue wrongly attributed to Plato, which was a favourite in Renaissance days.  Also he completed the chief composition of his lifetime, the De inuentione dialectica, a considerable treatise on rhetoric.  His favourite books, Geldenhauer tells us, were Pliny’s Natural History, the younger Pliny’s Letters, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, and selections from Cicero and Plato.  These were his travelling library, carried with him wherever he went; two of them, Pliny’s Letters and Quintilian, he had copied out with his own hand.  Other books, as he acquired them, he planted out in friends’ houses as pledges of return.