This second visit of Erasmus to Cambridge was under pleasant conditions.  Fisher was interested in his work, and having been until recently President of Queens’—­the foundation of Margaret of Anjou, which Elizabeth Woodville had succoured, York coming to the rescue of Lancaster—­he was able without difficulty to secure rooms in college for his protege.  High up they are, at the head of a stair-case, where undergraduates still cherish his name, and where his portrait—­an heirloom from one generation to another—­may be seen surrounded by prints of gentlemen in pink riding to hounds; quite a suitable collocation for this very humanly minded scholar.  Besides his own work he lectured publicly for a few months.  He began to teach Greek, and lectured on the grammar of Chrysoloras.  Finding that this did not attract pupils, he changed to Gaza; which he evidently expected to be more popular.  But he did not persevere.  If his position was public (which is doubtful), there was no money to pay him for long; and it is a sign of the state of the University, that he found it no use to lecture on anything more advanced than grammar.  The Schoolmen were still strongly entrenched.

Besides teaching Greek he also lectured on Jerome’s Letters and his Apology against Ruffinus, books which, as we shall see, he was working at privately.  He is said to have held for a time the professorship of Divinity founded in Cambridge, as in Oxford, in 1497 by the Lady Margaret, but the records are inadequate; and here too it is possible that his teaching was a private venture.  He had no regular income except a pension from Lord Mountjoy, to which in 1512 Warham added the living of Aldington in Kent; and these were supplemented by occasional gifts from friends, which he courted by dedicating to them translations from Plutarch and Lucian, Chrysostom and Basil.  But this was not enough.  He was free in his tastes, and liked to be free in his spending.  He needed a horse to ride, and a boy to attend upon him.  In consequence we hear a good many complaints of penury, all through his three years at Cambridge, 1511 to 1514.

It is worth while to examine in detail the work that he completed during this period on the Letters of Jerome and the New Testament.  One afternoon in Oxford in 1499 he had had a long discussion with Colet, and in the course of it had argued strongly against a point of view which Colet had derived from Jerome.  Whether this set him on to read Jerome again—­he was already quite familiar with him—­is not clear; but a year later, when he was hard at work in Paris, he was already engaged upon correcting the text of Jerome, and adding a commentary, being specially interested in the Letters.  So far did his admiration carry him that he writes to a friend, ’I am perhaps biased; but when I compare Cicero’s style with Jerome’s, I seem to feel something lacking in the prince of eloquence himself’.  After he left Paris in 1501, we hear no more of Jerome till 1511.  It may therefore fairly be argued that his early work was done on manuscripts found in Paris libraries, very likely those of the great abbeys of St. Victor or St. Germain-des-Pres.