In 1479 he left Italy and went home.  On his way he stayed for some months with the Bishop of Augsburg at Dillingen, on the Danube, and there translated Lucian’s De non facile credendis delationibus.  A manuscript of Homer sorely tempted him to stay on through the winter.  He felt that without Homer his knowledge of Greek was incomplete; and he proposed to copy it out from beginning to end, or at any rate the Iliad.  But home called him, and he went on.  At Spires, in quest of manuscripts, he went with a friend to the cathedral library.  He describes it as not bad for Germany, though it contained nothing in Greek, and only a few Latin manuscripts of any interest—­a Livy and a Pliny, very old, but much injured and the texts corrupt—­and nothing at all that could be called eloquence, that is to say, pure literature.

When he had been a little while in Groningen, the town council bethought them to turn his talents and learning to some account.  He was a fine figure of a man, who would make a creditable show in conducting their business; and for composing the elegant Latin epistles, which every respectable corporation felt bound to rise to on occasions, no one was better equipped than he.  He was retained as town secretary, and in the four years of his service went on frequent embassies.  During the first year we hear of him visiting his father at Siloe, and contracting a friendship with one of the nuns[1]; to whom he afterwards sent a work of Eucherius, bishop of Lyons, which he had found in a manuscript at Roermond.  Twice he visited Brussels on embassy to Maximilian; and in the next year he followed the Archduke’s court for several months, visiting Antwerp, and making the acquaintance of Barbiriau, the famous musician.  Maximilian offered him the post of tutor to his children and Latin secretary to himself; the town of Antwerp invited him to become head of their school.  He might easily have accepted.  He was not altogether happy at Groningen.  His countrymen had done him honour, but they had no real appreciation for learning, and some of them were boorish and cross-grained.  It was the old story of Pegasus in harness; the practical men of business and the scholar impatient of restraint.  His parents, too, were now both dead—­in 1480, within a few months of each other—­and such homes as he had had, with his father amongst the nuns at Siloe and with his mother in the house of her husband the tranter, were therefore closed to him.  And yet neither invitation attracted him.  Friesland was his native land; and for all his wanderings the love of it was in his blood.  Adwert, too, was near, and Wessel.  He refused, and stayed on in his irksome service.

[1] In view of Geldenhauer’s testimony to Agricola’s high
character in this respect, we need not question, as does
Goswin of Halen, the nature of this intimacy.