Excerpt from Utopia

Flanders, to settle commercial difficulties with the regency of the young Charles, already by right of his mother King of Castile. This embassy kept him away from England for nearly seven months, and was very irksome and expensive to him, but it gave him the great advantage of becoming intimate with Cuthbert Tunstall, an ecclesiastic much versed in diplomacy and no mean scholar (as his letters to Bude, the doyen of French learning, show), whose Opinion Erasmus himself quoted to Aldus along with those of Grocyn, Linacre and Latimer, in order to induce the great printer to publish his translation of Euripides. It also introduced him to Jerome Busleiden, of Mechlin, whose library and collections of antiques delighted him, and who paid the English author the compliment of writing a commendatory letter for his book. But above all he valued the Oppor tunity of meeting Peter Gilles, the friend and host of Erasmus, who plays so promih'emn't a part in Utopia, a man so learned, witty and modest, that I would gladly pay a good part of my fortune to be his constant companion and certainly it is a charmingly ingenuous and frank counten ance which Quintin Matsys shows us in the diptych of Erasmus and Gilles, which he painted in May, 1517, for presentation to More. Peter was not very well at the time, and Erasmus, at the advice of a doctor, took some pills, with such bad results that the painter refused to go on with the sittings until he had recovered his proper expression. A good part of More's leisure time, when the duties of the embassy were not pressing, must have been devoted to the composition of Book II. Of Utopia.

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