Subsequently, in Cambridge, he again had access to manuscripts and completed his recension of the Letters.  Robert Aldridge, a young Fellow of King’s, afterwards Bishop of Carlisle, speaks of working with him at Jerome in Queens’, probably helping him in collation.  An early catalogue of the Queens’ library does not contain any mention of Jerome, so that Erasmus had probably borrowed his manuscripts from elsewhere—­perhaps, like those of the New Testament, from the Chapter Library at St. Paul’s; for later on, when the book was in the press, he returned from Basle to England to consult the manuscripts again, and there is no reason to suppose that during his brief stay—­not a full month—­he went outside London.  If this surmise were correct, the destruction of St. Paul’s library in the fires of 1561 and 1666 would explain why so little has been discovered about the manuscripts which Erasmus had for his Jerome.  He himself, in his prefaces, gives little indication of them, beyond saying that they were very old and mutilated, and that some of them were written in Lombardic and Gothic characters.  Perhaps some day a student of Jerome will arise who will be able to throw light on the matter from examination of the text at which Erasmus arrived.

To the New Testament—­the other work which occupied his time at Cambridge—­he had also turned his attention shortly after his return to Paris in 1500, beginning a commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul.  At the first start he wrote four volumes of it, but then for some reason threw it aside, and never completed it, though his mind recurred to it at intervals; and on one occasion after a fall from his horse, in which he injured his spine, he vowed to St. Paul that he would finish it, if he recovered.  Probably he felt that his vow was redeemed by his Paraphrases of the New Testament, which he wrote a few years later, beginning with St. Paul, and completing the Epistles before he undertook the Gospels.

His next work on the New Testament came to him at Louvain in 1504.  Walking out one day to the Abbey of Parc, outside the town—­a house of White Canons, Erasmus himself being a Black—­he came upon a manuscript in their library, the Annotations of Valla on the New Testament.  There was an affinity between his mind and that of the famous scholar-canon of St. John Lateran, who, in spite of his dependence on Papal patronage and favour, had been unable to keep his tongue from asking awkward questions, from inquiring even into the authenticity of the Donation of Constantine.  Erasmus read the Annotations and liked their critical, scholarly tone, and the frequent citations of the original Greek.  With the characteristic generosity of the age he was allowed to carry the manuscript away and print it in Paris, with a dedication to an Englishman, Christopher Fisher, perhaps a kinsman of the Bishop of Rochester.