shed, who, leaving
wife and children at home, under a vow made in their cups, run off along
with a few pot-companions to Rome, Compostella, or Jerusalem. But, as
manners now are, I think it a holier work to dissuade men altogether
from such Vows than to urge to the making of them.

These, forsooth, are the execrable heresies which yonder Lynceus
descries in the Puerile Colloquy. I wonder why he does not also give my
Catunculus and the Publian mimes[D] a dusting. Who does not perceive
that these attacks proceed from some private grudge? Yet in nothing have
I done him an injury, except that I have favoured good literature, which
he hates more than sin; and knows not why. Meantime he boasts that he
too has a weapon, by which he may take his revenge. If a man at a feast
calls him Choroebus or a drunkard, he in his turn will in the pulpit cry
heretic, or forger, or schismatic upon him. I believe, if the cook were
to set burnt meat on the dinner-table, he would next day bawl out in the
course of his sermon that she was suspected of heresy. Nor is he
ashamed, nor does he retreat, though so often caught, by the very facts,
in manifest falsehood.

[Footnote D: Publius Syrus (B.C. 45), a writer of _mimes_, or familiar
prose dramas. A collection of apophthegms from his works is said to have
been used as a school-book in Jerome's days.]

In the first place what a foolish, what a mad blather he made against my
revised New Testament! Next, what could be more like madness than that
remark which he threw out against J. Faber and myself, when the very
facts bespoke that he did not understand what agreement there was
between me and Faber, or what was the subject of controversy! What more
shameless than his fixing a charge of forgery and heresy in the course
of a public address on me, because I rendered according to the Greek:
Omnes quidem non resurgemus, sed omnes immutabimur ("We shall not all
rise again, but we shall all be changed.") What more like a raging
madman, then his warning the people at Mechlin, in a public address, to
beware of the heresy of Luther and Erasmus! Why should I now recall the
ravings that he belches out rather than utters in the midst of his high
feasting as often as his zeal for the house of the Lord is inflamed from
his cups? He lately said in Holland, that I was set down for a forger
among the divines of Louvain. (One who was present and heard it wrote to
me.) When asked, Why? Because, says he, he so often