"You ask me, my dear Margaret, for money with too much bashfulness and timidity, since you are asking from a father that is eager to give, and since you have written to me a letter such that I would not only repay each line of it with a golden philippine, as Alexander did the verses of Cherilos, but, if my means were as great as my desire, I would reward each syllable with two gold ounces. As it is, I send you only what you have asked, but would have added more, only that as I am eager to give, so am I desirous to be asked and coaxed by my daughter, especially by you, whom virtue and learning have made so dear to my soul. So the sooner you spend this money well, as you are wont to do, and the sooner you ask for more, the more you will be sure of pleasing your father." Linacre, the second of the group with whom More was associated to a considerable extent, is one of the great characters of the England of that time. Like More, he had attracted the attention of a great Churchman, Bishop Selling; when young, he had gone to Italy in his train and there had had the advantage of intimate association with the family of the Medici when Lorenzo the Magnificent was training his boys to be rulers of Italy, political and ecclesiastical. Linacre stayed some ten years in Italy, mainly during the pontificate of Pope Alexander VI, of whom so much that is derogatory has been said, but, instead of having his devotion to the Church lessened by the abuses that are said to have existed in Italy at this time, he came back to England as a fervent Catholic. Years afterwards, when toward the end of life {229} he felt its emptiness, he distributed his property for educational purposes and became a priest. His foundations in both Cambridge and Oxford, and especially his foundation of the Royal College of Physicians, were very valuable contributions to the intellectual life of England. The College of Physicians lives on under the constitutions that he provided. His chairs founded at Oxford and Cambridge were not so fortunate, because the disturbances of the end of Henry VIII's reign and the time of Edward VI led to the confiscation of many of these educational foundations, or at least of their diversion to the King's private purposes. Erasmus was the greatest scholar of the time, Linacre was looked up to as perhaps the best Greek scholar of the period, and, while in Italy, Manutius in Venice had taken advantage of his knowledge for the editing of certain of the Greek classics. He himself translated a number of volumes of Galen into Latin, and the translation was proclaimed, in Erasmus's words, to be better than the original Greek.