erever they are suggested, he must make the sign of the
cross on his back, and put a pinch of blessed salt on his tongue. Women
make him ill by employing charms and sorceries against him; it is no
wonder, for he has grey hair and eyes, a red face, a large nose, and a
corporation. No man should ever make use of necromancy to obtain a
woman's love, for a student of theology once fell in love with a baker's
daughter at Leipzig, and threw an enchanted apple at her,[43] which
caused her to fall violently in love with him, and finally led to a
scandal in the church."

No one enjoyed these epistles more thoroughly than Erasmus,[44] who,
perhaps, from being himself a monk, appreciated them the better. He is
said to have laughed so immoderately over some parts of them, that he
burst an abscess, which might have proved fatal to him. He was one of
those few celebrated men who combine both humour and learning, and he
seems to have imbibed somewhat of the spirit of Lucian, whose works he
translated, and who also lived in an age of religious controversy and
transition. There was such a love of amusement, and so little
earnestness in Erasmus, that he could laugh on both sides of the
question, with the Reformers and against them. When the monks told him
that Luther had married a nun, and that the offspring of such an unholy
alliance must needs be Antichrist, he merely replied: "Already are there
many Antichrists!" Writing to a zealous Catholic in London, he says
"that he grudges the heretics their due, because that, whereas winter is
approaching, it will raise the price of fagots." In another place he
attacks dignities: "No situation," he says, "could be more wretched than
that of the vicegerents of Christ, if they endeavoured to follow
Christ's life." There was scarcely anything sacred or profane which was
safe from the lash of his ridicule, and if, as some say, he sowed the
seeds of the Reformation, it was mostly because he could not resist the
temptation to laugh at the clergy. He wrote a very characteristic Work
entitled "The Praise of Folly," "Encomium Moriae" (a play on the name of
Sir Thomas More), in which he maintains a sort of paradox, setting forth
the value and advantages of folly, _i.e._, of indulging the light
fancies and errors of imagination. With much humorous illustration he
enumerates a great many conceits, and includes among them jests, but his
main argument may be thus condensed.[45]

"Who knows not that man's chi