was elected to the Lady Margaret Professorship of Divinity in 1511, and in those days the election was ordered to take place on the last day of term before the Long Vacation. His residence, then, can hardly have begun later than the early part of 1511.
It is interesting to think of him—now a man of forty-four, but prematurely old in appearance—moving about the narrow streets or quiet courts of that medieval Cambridge which was just about to become the modern—a transformation due, in no small measure, to the influence of his own labours. Eleven of our colleges existed. Peterhouse was in the third century of its life; others also were of a venerable age. Erasmus would have heard the rumour that a house of his own order, the Hospital of the Brethren of St John, was about to be merged in a new and more splendid foundation, the College of St John the Evangelist. Where Trinity College now stands, he would have seen the separate institutions which, after another generation, were to be united by Henry VIII.; he would have seen a hostel of the Benedictines where Magdalene College was soon to arise; the Franciscans on the site of Sidney Sussex, and the Dominicans on the site of Emmanuel. North of Queens' College, he would have found the convent of the Carmelites; and then, rising in lonely majesty—with no other College buildings as yet on its south side—the chapel of King's, completed as to the walls, but not yet roofed.
When Erasmus began his Greek lectures in his
