Though he remained faithful to Oxford, Latimer in his later years held two livings near Chipping Campden:  in one, Weston-sub-Edge, he rebuilt his parsonage-house and left his initials W.L. in the stonework, in the other, Saintbury, there is a contemporary medallion of him in the East window, showing the tall, thin figure which George Lily describes.

At the time of Erasmus’ first visit to England, 1499, London was far more a centre of the new intellectual life than either Oxford or Cambridge.  He rejoiced in his first meeting with Colet, and in their walks in Oxford gardens in the soft October sunshine; his Prior at St. Mary’s was benign and helpful; and he found a young compatriot, John Sixtin, of Bolsward in East Friesland, studying law, and engaged with him in a contest of that arid elegance which the taste of the age still demanded.  But in London he found Grocin at his City living, ready to lend him books, and perhaps already contemplating those lectures delivered two years later, on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy of Dionysius, which brought him to such a surprising conclusion—­a denial of the attribution of them to Dionysius the Areopagite, which in agreement with Colet he had set out to prove.  In London was Linacre, just returned from Venice, full of Aldus’ Greek Aristotle; to a supplementary volume of which he had sent a translation of Proclus’ Sphere, a mathematical work then highly esteemed.  He had been working on Aristotelian commentators, and was soon to lecture on the Meteorologica—­a course which More, who was working for the Bar in London, attended.  More himself not long afterwards lectured publicly in London on Augustine’s de Ciuitate Dei, also a favourite work with the humanists.  William Lily, returned from his pilgrimage, was at work perhaps already as a schoolmaster in London; and vying with More in translating the Greek Anthology into Latin elegiacs.  Bernard Andreas, the blind poet of Toulouse, after trying his fortune in vain at Oxford, had insinuated himself into Henry VII’s confidence, and was now attached to the court as tutor to Prince Arthur—­an office from which Linacre attempted unsuccessfully to oust him—­and busy with his history of the king’s reign:  a project which enjoyed royal favour, and was the forerunner of Polydore Vergil’s creditable essay towards a critical history of England.

When Erasmus was again invited to England in 1505-6, the position had not changed.  He writes to a friend in Holland:  ’There are in London five or six men who are thorough masters of both Latin and Greek:  even in Italy I doubt that you would find their equals.  Without wishing to boast, it is a great pleasure to find that they think well of me.’  To Colet in the following year, when he had said farewell, he writes from Paris:  ’No place in the world has given me such friends as your City of London:  so true, so learned, so generous, so distinguished, so unselfish, so numerous.’  With the string of epithets we are not concerned:  the point to remark is that it is of London he writes, not of either of the universities.