Pagina 25 [25]
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xviii Introduction of them, Martin Dorp, a young lecturer at Louvain, reproved him for treating sacred things with undue levity and urged him to consider, if nothing else, at least his own reputation. ‘Formerly every one admired your writings ; but now this wretched Moria, like Dauus in the play, is upsetting everything.’ Erasmus defended himself in a long apology, but the theologians were never satisfied. Twenty years later a Spaniard, Caruaialus, compared him to the lawyer who, feigning madness, had stirred up the Sicilians to a massacre of the French. ‘Erasmus’, he wrote bitterly, ‘in the guise of a jester is destroying the whole Church with his quips and jokes.’ Erasmus must have seen Brant’s ‘ Narrenschiff’? and Badius’s ‘ Stultiferae Naves’, but his ‘Praise of Folly’ is in no sense an imitation. The satire is far more subtle. Folly, in cap and bells, is made to mount the rostrum and sing her own praises. She is shown as the laughing goddess, whose very appearance lightens men’s hearts and spurs them to greater achievements than the calculations of reason. Erasmus delights in making the worse appear the better
