"During the last two years, besides much other work, I revised the epistles of Jerome, marking with an obelus spurious and interpolated passages. By a comparison of ancient Greek texts I have emended the whole New Testament and have annotated more than a thousand passages, not without profit for the theologians. I have begun commentaries to the epistles of Paul and shall complete them when I have disposed of the others. For I have made up my mind to spend my life in sacred studies and to this end I am devoting all my spare time. In this work men of great repute say that I can do what others cannot; in your kind of life I should simply accomplish nothing at all. I am on intimate terms with many learned and serious men, both here [England?] and in Italy and in France, but I have thus far found no one who would advise me to return to you, or think it the better course. Nay, more, even your predecessor, Nicholas Wittenherus, always used to advise me rather to attach myself to some bishop, adding that he knew both my nature and the ways of his brethren." Finally he goes into the old story of his monastic gown, "laid aside in Italy lest I be killed, in England because it would not be tolerated," and concludes by repeating his determination not to return to a kind of life in which, now more than ever, there was no place for him.[103] This letter shows us how Erasmus could paint his English life when it was a question of raising his market price. The same note of self-valuation is sounded in a letter to his old friend, the abbot of St. Bertin in Flanders, written from London in 1513 or 1514. He is seriously considering returning to his own country and would be glad to do so, if only the prince--presumably Charles of Burgundy, the future emperor--would give him a fortune sufficient for his modest leisure (_ociolum_). "Not that Britain displeases me or that I am tired of my Mæcenases." He gets enough and could get more, if he would go round about it ever so little,--we remember his letters to Ammonius,--only times are bad; an island is an isolated kind of place anyway, and wars are making England doubly an island. Then comes one of his usual tirades against war in the abstract.