* * * * *

In later years he always spoke slightingly of his _Moria_. He considered
it so unimportant, he says, as to be unworthy of publication, yet no
work of his had been received with such applause. It was a trifle and
not at all in keeping with his character. More had made him write it, as
if a camel were made to dance. But these disparaging utterances were not
without a secondary purpose. The _Moria_ had not brought him only
success and pleasure. The exceedingly susceptible age in which he lived
had taken the satire in very bad part, where it seemed to glance at
offices and orders, although in his preface he had tried to safeguard
himself from the reproach of irreverence. His airy play with the texts
of Holy Scripture had been too venturesome for many. His friend Martin
van Dorp upbraided him with having made a mock of eternal life. Erasmus
did what he could to convince evil-thinkers that the purpose of the
_Moria_ was no other than to exhort people to be virtuous. In affirming
this he did his work injustice: it was much more than that. But in 1515
he was no longer what he had been in 1509. Repeatedly he had been
obliged to defend his most witty work. Had he known that it would
offend, he might have kept it back, he writes in 1517 to an acquaintance
at Louvain. Even towards the end of his life, he warded off the
insinuations of Alberto Pio of Carpi in a lengthy expostulation.

Erasmus made no further ventures in the genre of the _Praise of Folly_.
One might consider the treatise _Lingua_, which he published in 1525, as
an attempt to make a companion-piece to the _Moria_. The book is called
_Of the Use and Abuse of the Tongue_. In the opening pages there is
something that reminds us of the style of the _Laus_, but it lacks all
the charm both of form and of thought.

Should one pity Erasmus because, of all his publications, collected in
ten folio volumes, only the _Praise of Folly_ has remained a really
popular book? It is, apart from the _Colloquies_, perhaps the only one
of his works that is still read for its own sake. The rest is now only
studied from a historical point of view, for the sake of becoming
acquainted with his person or his times. It seems to me that perfect
justice has been done in this case. The _Praise of Folly_ is his best
work. He wrote other books, more erudite, some more pious--some perhaps
of equal or greater influence on his time. But each has had its day.
_Moriae