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The Praise of Folly 53 manner Philosophy of the rest; but let this one, for example’s sake, be enough. Yet why this? will some one say. Have patience, and Pll shew ye what I drive at. If any one seeing a Player acting his Part on a Stage, should go about to strip him of his disguise, and shew him to the people in his true Native Form, would he not, think ye, not onely spoil the whole design of the Play, but deserve himself to be pelted off with stones as a Phantastical Fool, and one out of his wits? But nothing is more common with them than such changes; the same person one while personating a Woman, and another while a Man; now a Youngster, and by and by a grim Seigniour; now a King, and presently a Peasant; now a God, and in a trice agen an ordinary Fellow. But to discover this were to spoil all, it being the onely thing that entertains the Eyes of the Spectators. And what is all this Life but a kind of Comedy, wherein men walk up and down in one another’s Disguises, and Act their respective Parts, till the property-man brings ’em back to the Tyring House. And yet he often orders a different Dress, and makes him that came
