In 1519, Erasmus completed for Froben an edition of _Cyprian_, planned as a companion to the _Jerome_, and an edition of Cicero’s _Offices_, a book which, as before mentioned, the list of no scholarly publisher could be without. In 1518, Froben published for his friend the _Familiar Colloquies_, which became, next to the _Praise of Folly_, the best known work of Erasmus, and which is accepted by his biographers, as expressing, perhaps more directly and comprehensively than any other of his writings, his personal opinions, prejudices, feelings, and preferences. Drummond says of it: “The established fame of the author, the intrinsic merits of the work itself, its adaptation to the times, the pungent epigrams which glittered on every page, and, perhaps not least, the suspicions of heresy which began to be whispered round, all contributed to secure for it an immense circulation.”[112] Froude writes: “The _Colloquies_ are pictures of his own mind, pictures of men and things which show the hand of an artist in the highest sense, never spiteful, never malicious, always delightful and amusing, and finished photographs of the world in which the author lived and moved.”[113] The book was translated into nearly every European tongue. The authorised editions were many and profitable, and the unauthorised, still more numerous. One printer in Paris took advantage of a report that the University was about to condemn the work, to print no less than twenty-four thousand copies.[114] From this edition the author appears to have derived no advantage. He bears patiently enough the financial injury caused by the unauthorised issues, but becomes justly indignant when a Dominican friar publishes an “expurgated edition” from which are eliminated or “corrected” the passages bearing hardly upon the monks, of which there were not a few. The work was finally condemned by the Sorbonne, and it had the honour, somewhat later, of being placed by the Inquisition in the first class of prohibited books.[115] In 1523, Erasmus published through Froben the first complete edition of the writings of S. Hilary, a work which, owing to the great corruption of the manuscript, cost him, as he tells us, enormous labour, and which was also for the publisher a very costly undertaking. The account books of Froben have, unfortunately, not been preserved, but it is probable from the references in his correspondence, that the _Hilary_, undertaken at the instance of Erasmus, brought upon him a loss. This was followed in the same year by an enlarged edition of his _Method of True Theology_, in which Erasmus draws a laboured comparison between the pains of authors and those of mothers, remarking that some of the former are like bears, which bring forth mere lumps of flesh and then are compelled to lick their cubs into shape.[116]