At length in 1495 he persuaded the Bishop to fulfil a desire which he had long cherished, and send him with a stipend to a University. He went to Paris and began reading for a Doctor's degree in Theology. But the course was too cramping, and he therefore used his opportunity to educate himself more widely; eking out the Bishop's grant by taking pupils. It was a hard life, and his health was delicate; but he did not flinch from his task, doing just enough paid work--and no more--to keep himself alive and to buy books. In 1499 one of his pupils, a young Englishman, Lord Mountjoy, brought him to England for a visit, and in the autumn sent him for a month or two to Oxford. There he fell in with Colet, a man of strong character and intellect, who was giving a new impulse to the study of the Bible by historical treatment. Colet's enthusiasm encouraged Erasmus in the direction to which he was already inclined; and when he returned to Paris in 1500, it was with the determination to apply his whole energy to classical learning, and especially to the study of Theology, which in the new world opening before him was still to be the queen of sciences. For the next four years he was working hard, teaching himself Greek and reading whatever he could find, at Paris or, when the plague drove him thence, at Orleans or Louvain. By 1504 his period of preparation was over, and the fruitful season succeeded. His first venture in Theology was to print in 1505 some annotations on the New Testament by Lorenzo Valla, an Italian humanist of the fifteenth century with whose critical temperament he was much in sympathy. Shortly afterwards a visit to England brought him what he had long desired--an opportunity of going to Italy. He set out in June 1506, as supervisor of the studies of two boys, the sons of Henry VII's physician. After taking the degree of D.D. at Turin in September he settled down at Bologna with his charges and worked at a book which he had had in hand for some years, and of which he had already published a specimen in 1500. To this book, the _Adagia_, he owed the great fame which he obtained throughout Europe, before any of the works on which his reputation now rests had been published. Its scheme was a collection of proverbial sayings and allusions, which he illustrated and explained in such a way as to make them useful to those who desired to study the classics and to write elegant Latin. In these days of lexicons and dictionaries the value of the _Adagia_ has passed away; but to an age which placed a high value on Latinity and which had little apparatus to use, the book was a great acquisition. It was welcomed with enthusiasm when Aldus published it at Venice in 1508: and throughout his life Erasmus brought out edition after edition, amplifying and enlarging a book which the public was always ready to buy.