Erasmus took up his residence at Louvain in 1516, not, so far as we know, in the capacity of a regular teacher, though he occupied a room in the university. There is the usual uncertainty as to his motives and feelings about the change. Writing to Ammonius from Brussels in the autumn of 1516,[119] he says, "I am most eager to hear how our business is getting on." Such passages of mysterious meaning occur in almost every letter to this fellow-scholar and indicate clearly that Ammonius was continually working in Erasmus' interest. They are now made somewhat clearer by the discoveries of W. Vischer at Basel. The reference is probably to the negotiations with the papacy in regard to the dispensations which bear date a few months later. It is probable also that Ammonius was putting in a word as he could in England to secure the regular payment of his friend's allowances. The letter goes on:
"I am going to winter in Brussels. Whatever you may send to Tunstall [the English ambassador at Brussels] will be handed to me at once; I am in continual relations with him. I am not disposed to go to Louvain. There I should have to be paying my duty to the scholastics at my own cost. The young men would be yelping at me all the time: 'correct this ode; or this epistle,' one will be calling for this author, one for that. There is no one there who can be either a help or an attraction to me. Besides all this I should have to listen sometimes to the snarlings of the pseudo-theologians, the most unpleasant kind of men. Lately there has arisen one of these who has stirred up almost a tumult against me, so that I am now holding the wolf by the ears, able neither to kill him nor to get away. He flatters me to my face and bites behind my back, promises me a friend and offers me an enemy. Would that mighty Jove would smash up this whole class of men and make them over again; for they contribute nothing to make us better or wiser, but are always making trouble with everyone."
But having had his grumble, Erasmus made up his mind to go. During the next four years Louvain was more his home than any other place. He left it, as we have seen, often and for months together, but it seems to have suited him as well as he was willing to be suited anywhere. His accounts of his relations with the place and the people are as apparently inconsistent as his utterances on other subjects. Within a short time after his settlement he writes to Tunstall:
"I find the theologians at Louvain men of high character and culture, especially John Atensis, Chancellor of this University, a man of incomparable learning and endowed with rare refinement. There is here no less theological learning than at Paris, but it is of a less sophistical and arrogant sort."
Again, in the autumn of 1518, he writes:
"The air thus far remains pure; there have been few cases of illness, and those of disease imported from elsewhere."
As to the individual scholars, he found himself on the best of terms with Martin Dorpius, the critic of his Moria, of whom he said in 1520, "on account of his distinguished talents for learning and eloquence I could not hate him even when he was made use of against me by evil managers." Dorpius continued to be his friend and admirer, as appears from the letter to Beatus, in which he is described as one of Erasmus' chief comforters during his tedious illness after the Rhine journey.