nse of
excrescences or follies in one's camp, is a very far cry from going over
to its foes. As a huge joke Erasmus wrote the _Praise of Folly_; as such
More and all his circle lauded it; as such Froben reprinted it; and as
such young Holbein pointed all its laughing gibes.

And it was part and parcel of the joke that he launched his own sly
arrow at the author himself. Erasmus could but laugh at the adroitness
with which the young man from Augsburg had drawn a reverend scholar
writing away at his desk, among the votaries of Folly, and written
_Erasmus_ over his head. But it was hardly to be expected that he should
altogether relish the witty implication, or the presumption of the
unknown painter who had ventured to make it. Nor did he. Turning over a
page he also contrived to turn the laugh yet once again, this time
against the too-presuming artist. Finding, perhaps, the coarsest of the
sketches, one in keeping with the "fat and splendid pig from the drove
of Epicurus," he in his turn wrote the name of _Holbein_ above the
wanton boor at his carousals. It was a reprisal not more delicate than
the spirit with which subjects too sacred to have been named in the same
breath with Folly,--the very words of our Lord Himself,--had been
dragged into such company. But though it, too, was a joke, this little
slap of wounded amour propre has found writers to draw from it an entire
theory that Holbein led a life of debauchery!

Yet even this feat of deduction is surpassed by that which argues that
because Erasmus and Holbein lashed bad prelates and vicious monks with
satire, therefore they detested the whole hierarchy of Rome and loathed
all monks, good or bad. "Erasmus laid the egg which Luther hatched" is
the oft-repeated cry; forgetting or ignoring the plain fact that Erasmus
eyed the Lutheran egg with no little mistrust in its shell and with
unequivocal disgust in its full-feathered development. "What connection
have I with Luther," he writes some three years after Holbein illustrated
Stultitia's worshippers, "or what recompense have I to expect from him
that I should join with him to oppose the Church of Rome, which I take
to be the true part of the Church Catholic, or to oppose the Roman
Pontiff who is the head of the Catholic Church? I am not so impious as
to dissent from the Church nor so ungrateful as to dissent from Leo,
from whom I have received uncommon favour and indulgence."

As to Holbein's "Protestant sympathies"-