His visit to Italy need not detain us long.  Twenty-five years later he wrote to an Italian nobleman with whom he was engaged in controversy, to say that Italy had taught him nothing.  ’When I came to Italy, I knew more Greek and Latin than I do now.’  In the excitement of contention he perhaps ‘remembered with advantages’, for in Italy he had one great opportunity.  He had published in 1500 at Paris a chrematistic work entitled Collectanea Adagiorum, a collection of Latin proverbs with brief explanations designed to be useful to the numerous public who aspired to write Latin with elegance.  After the book was out, as authors do, he went on collecting, and on his way to Italy in 1506, he published a slightly enlarged edition, also in Paris.  In Italy he made acquaintance with Aldus, and after finishing his year of superintendence over the pupils he had brought with him, he went, about the beginning of 1508, to dwell in the Neacademia at Venice.  In September 1508 there appeared from Aldus’ press a Volume on the same subject, but very different in bulk; no longer Collectanea Adagiorum, but Adagiorum Chiliades.  The Paris volume, a thin quarto, had contained about 800 proverbs, Aldus’ had more than 3,000, and the commentary became so amplified, with occasional lengthy disquisitions on subjects moral and political, that nothing but a folio size would accommodate it.

Where this work was done, Erasmus does not specifically state.  One passage gives the impression that he had made his new collections in England; but as one reason for his dissatisfaction with the first edition was the absence of citations from the Greek, it seems more probable that he really wrote the new book in Aldus’ house at Venice.  There, surrounded by the scholars of the New Academy, Egnatius, Carteromachus, Aleander, Urban of Belluno, besides Aldus himself and his father-in-law Asulanus, having at hand all the wealth of the Aldine Greek editions and the Greek manuscripts which were sent from far and near to be printed, Erasmus was thoroughly equipped to transform his quarto into folio, his hundreds into thousands.  He tells us that the compositors printed as he wrote, and that he had hard work to keep pace with them.  Some of his rough manuscripts—­written rapidly in his smooth hand and flowing sentences—­survive still to help us picture the scene.  It is remarkable how little correction there is.  Here and there a whole page is drawn straight through, to be rewritten, or a passage is inserted in the neat margin; but there is little botching, little mending of words or transposing of phrases, such as make the rough work of other humanists difficult reading.  As he wished the sentences to run, so they flowed on to his pages, and so they actually were printed.

The importance of Erasmus’ time in Italy is, then, that he completed, or at any rate published, the enlarged Adagia, his first considerable work, a book which carried his name far and wide throughout Europe, and won him fame amongst all who had pretensions to scholarship.  No one reads it to-day.  Except the composition of the schools, for which Erasmus is considered unclassical, there is little Latin writing now; but in its youth the book had a great vogue, and went through hundreds of reprints.