at the time of this visit of Agrippa; but unfortunately he makes no allusion to it, neither in his life of Colet, nor in his later correspondence with Agrippa, nor, so far as I know, elsewhere in his works.  If he had done so, it might have solved a problem which is very curious in the case of a public man of his fame and position, and of whom so much is otherwise known.  From the autumn of 1509, when he returned from Italy and wrote the Praise of Folly in More’s house in Bucklersbury, until April 1511, when he went to Paris to print it, Erasmus completely disappears from view.  He published nothing, no letter that he wrote survives, we have no clue to his movements.  If it had been any one else, we might almost conjecture that, like Hermonymus, he was in prison.  It was just during this period that Cornelius Agrippa was in London.  If either had mentioned the other, we should have a spark to illumine this singular belt of darkness.

When Erasmus returned to Cambridge in 1511, he was already familiar with the field in which he was going to work; but the precise order in which his scheme unfolded itself, whether the Greek text was his first aim or an afterthought, is not clear, his utterances being perhaps intentionally ambiguous.  During these three years in Cambridge he refers occasionally to the ‘collation’ and ‘castigation’ of the New Testament, so that evidently he was engaged with the four Greek manuscripts, which, according to an introduction in his first edition, he had before him for his first recension.  One of these has been identified, the Leicester Codex written by Emmanuel of Constantinople, which, as already mentioned, was with the Franciscans at Cambridge early in the sixteenth century.

By 1514 he was ready.  In the last three years he had completed Jerome and the New Testament, and had also prepared for the press some of Seneca’s philosophical writings, from manuscripts at King’s and Peterhouse; besides lesser pieces of work.  A difficulty arose about the printing.  In 1512 he had been in negotiation with Badius Ascensius of Paris to undertake Jerome and a new edition of the Adagia.  What actually happened is not known.  But in December 1513 he writes to an intimate friend that he has been badly treated about the Adagia by an agent—­a travelling bookseller, who acted as go-between for printers and authors and public; that instead of taking them to Badius and offering him the refusal, the knavish fellow had gone straight to Basle and sold them, with some other work of Erasmus, to a printer who had only just completed an edition of the Adagia.  Erasmus’ indignation does not ring true.  It is highly probable that he was in search of a printer with greater resources than Badius, who as yet had produced nothing of any importance in Greek, and would therefore be unable to do justice to the New Testament; and that accordingly he had commissioned the agent to negotiate with a firm which by now had established a great reputation—­that