Ammonius sent the wine, not so much as Erasmus had expected, but refused with some heat to hear of pay, and we have Erasmus' reply:
"You have given me a double pleasure, most amiable Ammonius, by sending with your merry wine letters far merrier still, and smacking exactly of your genius and disposition, and these in my judgment are the sweetest that ever were. As to my mention of pay which makes you so angry, indeed I was not ignorant of your character, which is worthy of a kingly fortune. But I supposed you were going to send me a great flagon, enough to last me several months—yet even this is too large for a modest man to receive without pay.... I marvel that you stick to your nest so perpetually and never take a flight away. If you should ever be pleased to visit this Academy you would be welcomed by many, by me first of all. You bid me come back to you if I get too tired here, but I can't see any attraction for me in London except the companionship of two or three friends."
Ammonius accompanied the English army in the Flemish campaign of 1513, and Erasmus writes to him in camp, thanking him for the vivid description of army life which he has sent home, and introducing him to various friends of his own in the Low Countries.
"O happy man," he says, "if God permits you to return safely to us! What merry tales your experience of these horrors will supply you with for the rest of your life! But, my dear Ammonius, I beseech you again and again, as I have cautioned you in my recent letters, by the Muses and Graces, look out that you do your fighting from a safe distance. Be as furious as you like—with your pen,—and slay with it ten times ten thousand men a day." As for himself, he says he is hanging on at Cambridge, "looking about me every day for a convenient chance to fly away. Only no opportunity offers. I am kept also by the thirty nobles which I am expecting at Michaelmas. I am so on fire with zeal to re-edit Jerome and to illustrate it with commentaries, that I seem to be inspired by some god. I have now nearly completed the revision and have collated many ancient texts, and all this at great expense to myself."
At Cambridge, as elsewhere, Erasmus seems always to have been on the eve of flight, working away at what interested him, but neglecting everything else as far as possible.
"I wrote to you once and again in camp," he says to Ammonius, "but meanwhile was in a no less serious warfare here with my emendations of Seneca and Jerome than you with the Frenchmen. Although I was not in camp, Durham has given me ten crowns from the French plunder;—but I'll tell you all about this when I see you, and meanwhile will be on the lookout for your military letters.—Good-bye, best of friends. I don't need to ask of you what you are always doing of your own accord, and yet I do ask that if any chance offers you will help me along with a word of recommendation. For these few months I have cast anchor securely. If things go well, I will fancy that here is my native land, which I have preferred to Rome and where old age is coming upon me; if not I will break away, it doesn't much matter whither, and will at all events die somewhere else. I will call upon all the gods to bear witness to the confidence by which he whom you know has ruined me. If I had promised with three words what he has repeated so often and in such sounding phrases, I know that what I promised I would have performed. May I be damned if I wouldn't rather die than let a man who was dependent on me go destitute. I congratulate you, dear Ammonius, that Fortune, not always so unjust as she is to me, is now, as I hear, smiling upon you. Good-bye again."
"For months now," he writes, "I have been living the life of a snail, shut up at home and brooding in silence over my studies. There is a great deal of solitude here; many are away through fear of the plague,—though even when everyone is here it is a solitude. The expense is intolerable and there is not a farthing of profit. Think of it! I swear by all that's sacred that in the five months since I came here I have spent sixty nobles and have only received one from some of my hearers and that with much reluctance on my part. It is certain that during this winter I shall leave no stone unturned and, as they say, shall weigh the anchor of my safety. If things go well, I shall make myself a nest somewhere; if not, I shall certainly fly away from here, I know not whither; if nothing else I will at least die elsewhere."
Ammonius reports upon his progress in begging for Erasmus, and Erasmus, quite in the tone of the old correspondence with Battus, thanks him and urges him to further effort.