Pagina 35 [35]
OCR
4 Erasmus a Hobby-horse. For what injustice is it, that when we allow every course of life its Recreation, that Study only should have none? especially when such toyes are not without their serious matter, and foolery is so handled that the Reader that is not altogether thick-skull’d may reap more benefit from ’t than from some men’s crabbish and specious Arguments. As when one, with long study and great pains, patches many pieces together on the praise of Rhetorick or Philosophy; another makes a Panegyrick to a Prince; another encourages him to a War against the Turks; another tells you what will become of the world after himself is dead ; and another finds out some new device for the better ordering of Goat’s-wooll: for as. nothing is more trifling than to treat of serious matters triflingly, so nothing carries a better grace, than so to discourse of trifles as a man may seem to have intended them least. For my own part, let other men judge of what I have written; though yet, unlesse an overweening opinion of my self may have made me blind in my own cause, I have prais’d Folly, but not altogether foolishly. And now to say
