"As long as I was at Louvain," he writes, "whenever I went to Brussels or Mechlin, though I had promised to return within ten days, those people, who are ashamed of nothing, would spread a rumour that I had run away through fear. Then when I was taking a holiday for my health at Anderlech, a place close by Brussels, where the king's palace is, and often running back to Louvain,--why then, I was in hiding! Frequently, I was at the same moment down with a hopeless fever at Louvain and had fallen from my horse and died of apoplexy at Brussels; and this at a time when I was--thanks be to Christ!--never better in my life. It was not enough to have killed the hapless Erasmus once for all, but they must needs butcher him with so many diseases, slay him with such a variety of tortures! "I did not go to the assembly at Worms,--or as learned men are now beginning to call it at 'Mutton-headtown,'--although I was invited, partly because I did not wish to be involved in the affair of Luther, which was then violently discussed; partly because I easily foresaw that in such a great sewage of princes and men of various races, the plague could not fail to appear as it did at Cologne when the emperor was first there. "When the emperor came back to Brussels, there was scarcely a day that I did not ride through the market-place and past the court and often I was about the court; in fact, I was almost more a resident at Brussels than at Anderlech. I daily paid my compliments to the bishops, though ordinarily I was not overzealous in such matters. I dined with the cardinal. I conversed with both nuncios; I visited ambassadors and they called upon me at Anderlech. Never in my life was I less in concealment, never more openly before the eyes of all men. And meanwhile there were some among those babblers who wrote to Germany that Erasmus was somewhere in hiding,--which I never found out until I got here in Basel. And again when the emperor was at Brussels with the king of Denmark, and Thomas, cardinal of York, was there as ambassador of the king of England, you know yourself, even if I had kept myself to your house, how much in hiding I should have been; since you had all, or at least the chief dignitaries of the court at your table and I was sitting among them a welcome guest, as I believe, to them all. How often I lunched or dined with the foremost men, even with the king of Denmark, who wanted me as his daily table-companion! Where did I not go riding, often in company with you! At what festivity of the great people was I not present--now at the imperial court, now in the family of the cardinal of York, now at one house, now at another! Yet I often refused invitations; for I am by nature a home-lover and my studies require a home-keeping life.