circumstance in which you can justly pretend to any
equality is the encouragement you gave to learning and your munificence
in promoting it, which was indeed very great. Your two colleges founded
at Ipswich and Oxford may vie with my University at Alcala de Henara. But
in our generosity there was this difference--all my revenues were spent
in well-placed liberalities, in acts of charity, piety, and virtue;
whereas a great part of your enormous wealth was squandered away in
luxury and vain ostentation. With regard to all other points, my
superiority is apparent. You were only a favourite; I was the friend and
the father of the people. You served yourself; I served the State. The
conclusion of our lives was also much more honourable to me than you.

_Wolsey_.--Did not you die, as I did, in disgrace with your master?

_Ximenes_.--That disgrace was brought upon me by a faction of foreigners,
to whose power, as a good Spaniard, I would not submit. A Minister who
falls a victim to such an opposition rises by his fall. Yours was not
graced by any public cause, any merit to the nation. Your spirit,
therefore, sank under it; you bore it with meanness. Mine was unbroken,
superior to my enemies, superior to fortune, and I died, as I had lived,
with undiminished dignity and greatness of mind.

DIALOGUE XXII.

LUCIAN--RABELAIS.

_Lucian_.--Friend Rabelais, well met--our souls are very good company for
one another; we both were great wits and most audacious freethinkers. We
laughed often at folly, and sometimes at wisdom. I was, indeed, more
correct and more elegant in my style; but then, in return, you had a
greater fertility of imagination. My "True History" is much inferior, in
fancy and invention, in force of wit and keenness of satire, to your
"History of the Acts of Gargantua and Pantagruel."

_Rabelais_.--You do me great honour; but I may say, without vanity, that
both those compositions entitle the authors of them to a very
distinguished place among memoir-writers, travellers, and even
historians, ancient and modern.

_Lucian_.--Doubtless they do; but will you pardon me if I ask you one
question? Why did you choose to write such absolute nonsense as you have
in some places of your illustrious work?

_Rabelais_.--I was forced to compound my physic for the mind with a large
dose of nonsense in order to make it go down. To own the truth to you,
if I had not so frequently put on the fool's-cap, the f