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Introduction XIX part, in proving that the dotards and lack-wits are the truly happy, and wise men miserable. Friendship is inspired by Folly, since no man could be friends with another, did he not foolishly overlook his faults. It is the blindness of Folly which makes matrimony possible ; the gaiety of Folly livens society; by her flattery cities are founded and empires held together. * There is no way to that so much famed wisdom, nor access to that fortress, as they call it, of happiness but under the banner of Folly.’ As he continued, Erasmus’s mood changed. He had started lightly, but his sense of the real folly of mankind overcame his lightness. His mocking banter passes into stern arraignment of the men he knew: the hunting men who “become beasts themselves, while yet they imagine they live the life of princes’; the men who have the ‘ itch of building ’, till they spend all their fortune ; the seekers after new inventions, the gamesters and the superstitious. The grammarians, tormenting the boys in their schools, brag as though they had conquered Africa, if they ‘happen to find out who was Anchises’s Mother, or pick out of some worm
