Page 22 [22]
Introduction XV
who had encouraged me to write, contrived to
have the book taken to France and printed,
but from a copy not only faulty but incomplete.
The failure of the work to please the public was
sufficiently shown by its being propagated in
type more than seven times in a few months,
and that in different places ; I wondered myself
what people found to like in it.’ 1
This account of the first edition cannot be
taken as correct. It was the convention of the
age to affect modesty by disclaiming all responsi¬
bility for publication, and the friends who
printed the book without Erasmus’s knowledge
were a polite fiction. Probably Erasmus him¬
self took the ‘ Moria’ to Paris on his brief visit
in the spring of 1511, at any rate he was there
when it was being printed. What he had been
doing in the interval from his arrival at More’s
house in the late summer of 1509 is not known.
For eighteen months there is no record of him
until he writes from Dover on his way to France.
Probably he was living with More, working at
Jerome and the New Testament, discussing
projects of reform and advising means for
* Epistles of Erasmus, tr. Nichols, vol. ii, p. 5.