No one enjoyed these epistles more thoroughly than Erasmus,[44] who, perhaps, from being himself a monk, appreciated them the better.  He is said to have laughed so immoderately over some parts of them, that he burst an abscess, which might have proved fatal to him.  He was one of those few celebrated men who combine both humour and learning, and he seems to have imbibed somewhat of the spirit of Lucian, whose works he translated, and who also lived in an age of religious controversy and transition.  There was such a love of amusement, and so little earnestness in Erasmus, that he could laugh on both sides of the question, with the Reformers and against them.  When the monks told him that Luther had married a nun, and that the offspring of such an unholy alliance must needs be Antichrist, he merely replied:  “Already are there many Antichrists!” Writing to a zealous Catholic in London, he says “that he grudges the heretics their due, because that, whereas winter is approaching, it will raise the price of fagots.”  In another place he attacks dignities:  “No situation,” he says, “could be more wretched than that of the vicegerents of Christ, if they endeavoured to follow Christ’s life.”  There was scarcely anything sacred or profane which was safe from the lash of his ridicule, and if, as some say, he sowed the seeds of the Reformation, it was mostly because he could not resist the temptation to laugh at the clergy.  He wrote a very characteristic Work entitled “The Praise of Folly,” “Encomium Moriae” (a play on the name of Sir Thomas More), in which he maintains a sort of paradox, setting forth the value and advantages of folly, i.e., of indulging the light fancies and errors of imagination.  With much humorous illustration he enumerates a great many conceits, and includes among them jests, but his main argument may be thus condensed.[45]

“Who knows not that man’s childhood is by far the most delightful period of his existence?  And why?  Because he is then most a fool.  And next to that his youth, in which folly still prevails; while in proportion as he retires from her dominion, and becomes possessed through discipline and experience of mature wisdom, his beauty loses its bloom, his strength declines, his wit becomes less pungent, until at last weary old age succeeds, which would be absolutely unbearable, unless folly, in pity for such grievous miseries, gave relief by bringing on a second childhood.  Nature herself has kindly provided for an abundant supply of folly in the human race, for since, according to the Stoic definition, wisdom means only being guided by reason; whereas folly, on the other hand, consists in submitting to the government of the passions; Jupiter wishing to make life merry, gave men far more passion than reason, banishing the latter into one little corner of his person, and leaving all the rest of the body to the sway of the former.  Man, however, being designed for the arrangement of affairs, could