This is the key-note of the "Erasmian Reform," and we shall hear it sounded many times again before the moment of action arrives. CHAPTER VII BASEL AND LOUVAIN--THE "INSTITUTIO PRINCIPIS CHRISTIANI" 1515-1518 Erasmus left England in early summer, 1514, on good terms with his English friends but without making such connections as could have served to keep him permanently in the country. He was bound to have explanations ready for any emergency, but we need not trouble ourselves to seek other reasons for his leaving England than that he did not wish to stay. He had accumulated a considerable stock of manuscripts and knew that he could get them into print better at Basel than in London. If we may trust a letter[100] sent back to Ammonius from the castle of Ham, in Picardy, of which Lord Mountjoy was governor, he came near losing these precious papers through what he always fancied to be the special malice of the English customs officials; but happily they were safely restored to him. [100] iii.¹, 137. The short stay at Ham is memorable for a famous letter written from there to Prior Servatius of the monastery at Steyn, where, we remember, Erasmus had passed the few years of his monastic experience. We gather from this letter that Servatius, a former companion of his at Steyn, had written to offer him a residence there where he might pass the remnant of his days in peace. Erasmus, in respectful and serious language, reminds Servatius that he had never really felt any calling to the life of seclusion, and goes over the familiar ground of his bodily and mental unfitness for it, the absurdity of supposing that a boy of seventeen could know himself well enough to decide once for all so momentous and complicated a question, and the compelling attraction of a free life devoted to intercourse with the highest things. He shows that his life has been, humanly speaking, a worthy one: he has cultivated virtue and avoided vice; he has had a delicate body to take care of and knows that Holland would be death to him. As to the conventual life itself, Erasmus lets himself go in sweeping condemnation, yet preserving still a certain dignity that is far more convincing than any extravagant abuse.[101] [101] iii.², 1528-A.