Aleander, when he returned from Orleans to Paris in 1511, kept quiet for a month, in order to awaken public interest.  Then he announced a course of lectures on Ausonius, to begin on 30 July.  His device was entirely successful.  Two thousand people gathered, and he was obliged to lead them over from his own college, de la Marche, to a larger building, known as the Portico of Cambray.  He had composed an elaborate oration of twenty-four pages.  ’It took me two hours and a half to deliver,’ he says, ’and would have taken four, if I hadn’t been a quick reader; but no one showed the least sign of fatigue, in spite of the heat.  My voice lasted very well.  Next day I had nearly as good an audience, although it was the day for the disputation at the Sorbonne.  On the day after, all seats were taken by 11, though I do not begin till 1.’  His success was not mere imagination.  One who was present tells us that men looked upon him as if he had come down from heaven, and shouted ‘Viuat, viuat’, as they were accustomed to do to Faustus Andrelinus, another witty Italian who was then lecturing in Paris.  A lecturer to-day who went on into the third hour would scarcely be so popular.

But Aleander was not alone in his powers of speech, and others besides Parisians could listen.  Butzbach tells us, not without humour, of a certain Baldwin Bessel of Haarlem, a learned physician with a wonderful memory, who was summoned to Laach to heal their Abbot, who lay sick.  On one occasion at Coblenz he harangued an audience of 300 for three hours on end on the power of eloquence, and stimulated by the sight of such a gathering, worked himself up in his peroration, until he believed himself to be a second Cicero.  His hearers perhaps did not agree.  Anyway, Butzbach is the only person who mentions him, and he would have preferred a little less eloquence and a little more medicine; for the Abbot, instead of recovering, died under the hands of the new Cicero in two days.

Besides lecturing at the university, young men also maintained themselves by working for the printers, correcting proof-sheets and composing complimentary prefaces and verses.  Another service which they could render to both printers and authors was to give public ‘interpretations’, as they were called, of new books on publication, for the purpose of advertisement.  These interpretations probably took place at the printer’s office, and were of the nature of a review, describing the book’s contents; and they were doubtless repeated at frequent intervals before new groups of likely purchasers.

Erasmus, however, had been sent to Paris to take a degree in Theology, and his patrons expected him to occupy himself with this.  When he returned from Holland in 1496 he could not face again the rigours of Montaigu, and so he took shelter in a boarding-house kept by a termagant woman—­’pessima mulier’ the bursar of the German nation, her landlords, called her when she would not pay her rent—­,