We shall probably be safe in thinking that Erasmus had a great gift of settling promptly to work and putting other things out of his mind while the spell of work was on him, the marvellous gift of concentration which has made more reputations than the gift of genius. Still, if we consider the peculiar demands of the work of editing texts, the necessity of an apparatus of books, the accumulation of material, all of which ought to be at hand for correction and comparison, the disadvantages of frequent change become more obvious and Erasmus' wanderings are so much the more inexplicable. His correspondence during these three years, from 1515 to 1518, is full of references to the question of a permanent residence. To judge from these one would suppose him to be firmly fixed in the notion of a settlement for life. Now it is England, now Flanders, now Basel, now Paris, with ever and anon the distant thought of Italy rising in the background as a possibility. We should not be going far wrong if we were to describe this period as that in which Erasmus was enjoying to the full a newly acquired sense of power and value. Not until after the appearance of his New Testament in 1516 could he feel that he had demonstrated to the world at once the grasp of his scholarship and the deep seriousness of his purpose. It was probably true then, as it may not have been quite true when he was bidding on himself to Servatius two years before, that any country in Europe would be glad to have him, and almost on his own terms. He liked to feel himself a citizen of the world and was tasting the joys of a universal popularity, too great to last for ever. Here and there we get glimpses of his way of life, which indicate a very considerable degree of prosperity. A letter[109] written to young Beatus and dated at Louvain in the autumn of 1518 gives a detailed account of his journey thither from Basel. [109] iii.¹, 371-C. "I left Basel," he says, "in a languid and enervated condition, like a man who has not yet got on good terms with out-of-doors, so long had I been shut up in the house, and yet busied with incessant work. [This refers to a long illness which had kept him indoors through the summer.] The sail was not unpleasant, only that towards noon the heat of the sun was rather oppressive. We dined at Breisach,--the worst kind of a dinner. The stench was enough to kill you and the flies worse than the stench.... "Towards night we were turned out into a chilly town, whose name I didn't care to know, nor if I knew it, should I care to speak it. There I was just about killed." Here follows a description, almost the same as that in the _Diversoria_, of the horrors of a German inn, always with the unlucky stove as the central figure.