But what concern us here are some manuscripts in the British Museum and the University Library at Cambridge, written by Meghen in 1506 and 1509 at Colet's order for presentation to his father, Sir Henry Colet, Lord Mayor of London, and containing in parallel columns the Vulgate and another Latin translation of the New Testament, 'per D. Erasmum Roterodamum'. Part and possibly all of this work was done by Erasmus, therefore, during this second residence in England in 1505-6. He tells us that he received two Latin manuscripts from Colet, which he found exceedingly difficult to decipher; but one cannot make a new translation from the Latin. To the Greek manuscripts used on this occasion he gives no clue.
In connexion with this help and encouragement shown by Colet as Dean to a foreign scholar, it is worth while to mention the visit to London in 1509 of Cornelius Agrippa, the famous philosopher and scientist, who had been sent to England by Maximilian on a diplomatic errand, which he describes as 'a very secret business'. During his stay, which lasted into 1510, he tells us that 'I laboured much over the Epistles of St. Paul, in the company of John Colet, a man most learned in Catholic doctrine, and of the purest life; and from him I learnt many things that I did not know'. Erasmus was in England at the time of this visit of Agrippa; but unfortunately he makes no allusion to it, neither in his life of Colet, nor in his later correspondence with Agrippa, nor, so far as I know, elsewhere in his works. If he had done so, it might have solved a problem which is very curious in the case of a public man of his fame and position, and of whom so much is otherwise known. From the autumn of 1509, when he returned from Italy and wrote the Praise of Folly in More's house in Bucklersbury, until April 1511, when he went to Paris to print it, Erasmus completely disappears from view. He published nothing, no letter that he wrote survives, we have no clue to his movements. If it had been any one else, we might almost conjecture that, like Hermonymus, he was in prison. It was just during this period that Cornelius Agrippa was in London. If either had mentioned the other, we should have a spark to illumine this singular belt of darkness.