t the prince's share in the composition.

CHAPTER IX

THE PRAISE OF FOLLY

_Moriae Encomium, The Praise of Folly_: 1509, as a work of
art--Folly, the motor of all life: Indispensable, salutary,
cause and support of states and of heroism--Folly keeps the
world going--Vital energy incorporated with folly--Lack of folly
makes unfit for life--Need of self-complacency--Humbug beats
truth--Knowledge a plague--Satire of all secular and
ecclesiastical vocations--Two themes throughout the work--The
highest folly: Ecstasy--The _Moria_ to be taken as a gay
jest--Confusion of fools and lunatics--Erasmus treats his
_Moria_ slightingly--Its value

While he rode over the mountain passes,[11] Erasmus's restless spirit,
now unfettered for some days by set tasks, occupied itself with
everything he had studied and read in the last few years, and with
everything he had seen. What ambition, what self-deception, what pride
and conceit filled the world! He thought of Thomas More, whom he was now
to see again--that most witty and wise of all his friends, with that
curious name _Moros_, the Greek word for a fool, which so ill became his
personality. Anticipating the gay jests which More's conversation
promised, there grew in his mind that masterpiece of humour and wise
irony, _Moriae Encomium_, the _Praise of Folly_. The world as the scene
of universal folly; folly as the indispensable element making life and
society possible and all this put into the mouth of Stultitia--Folly--
itself (true antitype of Minerva), who in a panegyric on her own power
and usefulness, praises herself. As to form it is a _Declamatio_, such
as he had translated from the Greek of Libanius. As to the spirit, a
revival of Lucian, whose _Gallus_, translated by him three years before,
may have suggested the theme. It must have been in the incomparably
lucid moments of that brilliant intellect. All the particulars of
classic reading which the year before he worked up in the new edition of
the _Adagia_ were still at his immediate disposal in that retentive and
capacious memory. Reflecting at his ease on all that wisdom of the
ancients, he secreted the juices required for his expostulation.

He arrived in London, took up his abode in More's house in Bucklersbury,
and there, tortured by nephritic pains, he wrote down in a few days,
without having his books with him, the perfect work of art that must
have been ready in his