It was in this study no doubt that much of the work was done for his edition of the New Testament in the original Greek, that epoch-making book which he published at Basle in 1516; and from hence also he must have written those amusing letters to his friends, Ammonius, Dean Colet, Sir Thomas More, in which comments on the progress of his work alternate with humorous grumblings about the Cambridge climate, the plague, the wine, the food: "Here I live like a cockle shut up in his shell, stowing myself away in college, and perfectly mum over my books.... I cannot go out of doors because of the plague.... I am beset with thieves, and the wine is no better than vinegar.... I do not like the ale of this place at all ... if you could manage to send me a cask of Greek wine, the very best that can be bought, you would be doing your friend a great kindness, but mind that it is not too sweet.... I am sending you back your cask, which I have kept by me longer than I otherwise should have done, that I might enjoy the perfume at least of Greek wine.... My expenses here are enormous; the profits not a brass farthing. Believe me as though I were on my oath, I have been here not quite five months, and yet have spent sixty nobles: while certain members of my (Greek) class have presented me with just a single one, which they had much difficulty in persuading me to accept. I have decided not to leave a stone unturned this winter, and in fact to throw out my sheet anchor. If this succeeds I will build my nest here; if otherwise, I shall wing my flight--whither I know not." Perhaps there is some playful exaggeration in all this. Anyhow Erasmus stayed at Cambridge seven years in all. He may have been justly disappointed in his Greek class-room: "I shall have perhaps a larger gathering when I begin the grammar of Theodorus," he writes plaintively; but disappointed there, he took refuge in his college study, and there, high up in the south-west tower of Queens', we may picture him, "outwatching the Bear" over the pages of S. Jerome, as Jerome himself in his time had outwatched it writing those same pages, eleven hundred years before, in his cell at Bethlehem; or pouring over the text of his Greek Testament and its translation, the boldest work of criticism and interpretation that had been conceived by any scholar for many a century, a _Novum Instrumentum_ indeed, by which the scholars of the new learning were to restore to the centuries which followed, the old true theology which had been so long obscured by the subtleties of the schoolmen, the new and truer theology which while based on a foundation of sound method and historical apparatus rests also in the joyous and refreshing story of the Son of God, in that unique figure of a Divine Personality, round whom centre the love, the hopes, the fears, the joys of the coming ages. [Illustration: The Bridge & Gables. Queen's College]