In 1440 King Henry VI founded King's College, and other colleges followed. Erasmus the great Dutch scholar, was at one of these, Queen's College, from 1511 to 1513, and though he writes that the College beer was "weak and badly made" he also mentions a pleasant custom that unfortunately seems to have ceased. "The English girls are extremely pretty," Erasmus says. "Soft, pleasant, gentle, and charming. When you go anywhere on a visit the girls all kiss you. They kiss you when you arrive. They kiss you when you go away and again when you return." Many other great men studied at Cambridge, among them Bacon, Milton, Cromwell, Newton, Wordsworth, Byron and Tennyson. Practical jokes seem always to have been common, and there is an amusing tale of one played on the poet Gray by the students of Peterhouse College where he lived. Gray was a rather nervous man with a fear of fire, and every night he used to hand a rope-lasser from his window for use in case a fire broke out. One night there was a great noise and shouts of "Fire! Fire!" Dressed only in his nightgown Gray opened his window, climbed into his ladder and slid down as fast as he could - into a barrel of cold water put there by a joking student! Let us give some idea of what you would see if you were to walk around Cambridge. Let us imagine that we're seeing the sights for the first time. It is a quite market town and the shopping center for quite a large area. In the center of the town is the market-place where several times each week country traders come to sell their produce.