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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 responsibility for publication, and the friends who printed the book without Erasmus’s knowledge were a polite fiction. Probably Erasmus himself 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.
