Mountjoy, intensely attracted by his brilliance, took him for his tutor, carried him over to England, and introduced him at the court of Henry the Seventh. At once his fortune was made. He charmed every one, and in turn he was himself delighted with the country and the people. English character, English hospitality, English manners--everything English except the beer--equally pleased him. In the young London men--the lawyers, the noblemen, even in some of the clergy--he found his own passion for learning. Sir Thomas More, who was a few years younger than himself, became his dearest friend; and Warham, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury--Fisher, afterwards Bishop of Rochester--Colet, the famous Dean of St. Paul's--the great Wolsey himself--recognised and welcomed the rising star of European literature. Money flowed in upon him. Warham gave him a benefice in Kent, which was afterwards changed to a pension. Prince Henry, when he became King, offered him--kings in those days were not bad friends to literature--Henry offered him, if he would remain in England, a house large enough to be called a palace, and a pension which, converted into our money, would be a thousand pounds a year. Erasmus, however, was a restless creature, and did not like to be caged or tethered. He declined the King's terms, but Mountjoy settled a pension on him instead. He had now a handsome income, and he understood the art of enjoying it. He moved about as he pleased--now to Cambridge, now to Oxford, and, as the humour took him, back again to Paris; now staying with Sir Thomas More at Chelsea, now going a pilgrimage with Dean Colet to Becket's tomb at Canterbury--but always studying, always gathering knowledge, and throwing it out again, steeped in his own mother wit, in shining Essays or Dialogues, which were the delight and the despair of his contemporaries. Everywhere, in his love of pleasure, in his habits of thought, in his sarcastic scepticism, you see the healthy, clever, well-disposed, tolerant, epicurean, intellectual man of the world. He went, as I said, with Dean Colet to Becket's tomb. At a shrine about Canterbury he was shown an old shoe which tradition called the Saint's. At the tomb itself, the great sight was a handkerchief which a monk took from among the relics, and offered it to the crowd to kiss. The worshippers touched it in pious adoration, with clasped hands and upturned eyes. If the thing was genuine, as Erasmus observed, it had but served for the archbishop to wipe his nose with--and Dean Colet, a puritan before his time, looked on with eyes flashing scorn, and scarcely able to keep his hands off the exhibitors. But Erasmus smiled kindly, reflecting that mankind were fools, and in some form or other would remain fools. He took notice only of the pile of gold and jewels, and concluded that so much wealth might prove dangerous to its possessors.