From Venice Erasmus went on to Rome, where he had a flattering reception, and, though a northerner, was recognized as an equal by the humanists of Italy. He was pressed to stay, but the death of Henry VII brought him an invitation to return to England, in the names of Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his old patron Mountjoy, who was loud in his praises of the 'divine' young king. As he rode hastily northwards, his active brain fell to composing a satire on the life he saw around him. He was a quick observer, and his personal charm had won him admission to the halls of the great; whilst bitter experience had shown him the life of the poor and needy. His satire, _The Praise of Folly_, cuts with no gentle hand into the deceits to which human frailty is prone and lays bare their nakedness. High and low, rich and poor, suffer alike, as Folly makes merry over them. There was much in the life of the age which called for censure, as there had been in the past and was to be in the future. On untrained lips censure easily degenerates into abuse and loses its sting: Erasmus with his gifts of humour and expression caught the public ear and set men thinking. In England, where he spent the next years, 1509-14, Erasmus began the great work of his life, an edition of the New Testament and of the Letters of Jerome. His time was spent between Cambridge and London, and his friends did what they could for his support. Warham presented him with a living--Aldington in Kent--and then as Erasmus could not reside and discharge the duties of a parish priest, allowed him to resign and draw a pension from the living--in violation of his own strict regulation. Mountjoy gave him another pension, and Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, sent him to Cambridge and gave him rooms in Queens' College. For a time he held the Professorship of Divinity founded in Cambridge, as in Oxford, by the Lady Margaret Tudor, mother of Henry VII. But teaching was not his gift. Others might inspire students from the teacher's chair: his talent could only enlighten the teacher through his books. At length the time came to publish. By fortunate accident, if not by design, he came into relations with John Froben of Basel, who with the three sons of his late partner, John Amorbach, was printing works of sound learning with all his energy--especially the Fathers. In July 1514 Erasmus set forth, and after a triumphal progress through Germany, fêted and welcomed everywhere, he settled at Basel to see Jerome and the New Testament through the press. By 1516 they were complete, and Erasmus had achieved--almost by an afterthought, for his first project had been a series of annotations like Valla's--the work which has made his name great.