passing by, for the most part,
local, temporary or indifferent points, seized upon the never-dying follies
of _human nature_ and impaled them on the printed page for the amusement,
the edification, and the warning of contemporaries and posterity alike. No
petty writer of laborious _vers de societe_ to raise a laugh for a week, a
month, or a year, and to be buried in utter oblivion for ever after, was
he, but a divine seer who saw the weakness and wickedness of the hearts of
men, and warned them to amend their ways and flee from the wrath to come.
Though but a retired student, and teacher of the canon law, a humble-minded
man of letters, and a diffident imperial Counsellor, yet is he to be
numbered among the greatest Evangelists and Reformers of mediaeval Europe
whose trumpet-toned tongue penetrated into regions where the names of
Luther or Erasmus were but an empty sound, if even that. And yet, though
helping much the cause of the Reformation by the freedom of his social and
clerical criticism, by his unsparing exposure of every form of corruption
and injustice, and, not least, by his use of the vernacular for political
and religious purposes, he can scarcely be classed in the great army of the
Protestant Reformers. He was a reformer from within, a biting, unsparing
exposer of every priestly abuse, but a loyal son of the Church, who rebuked
the faults of his brethren, but visited with the pains of Hell those of
"fals herytikes," and wept over the "ruyne, inclynacion, and decay of the
holy fayth Catholyke, and dymynucion of the Empyre."

So while he was yet a reformer in the true sense of the word, he was too
much of the scholar to be anything but a true conservative. To his
scholarly habit of working, as well as to the manner of the time which
hardly trusted in the value of its own ideas but loved to lean them upon
classical authority, is no doubt owing the classical mould in which his
satire is cast. The description of every folly is strengthened by notice of
its classical or biblical prototypes, and in the margin of the Latin
edition of Locher, Brandt himself supplied the citations of the books and
passages which formed the basis of his text, which greatly added to the
popularity of the work. Brandt, indeed, with the modesty of genius,
professes that it is really no more than a collection and translation of
quotations from biblical and classical authors, "Gesamlet durch Sebastianu
Brant." But even admitting the work to