The Online Library of Liberty

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• The Life of Erasmus.
• Erasmus’s Epistle to Sir Thomas More.
• On the Argument and Design of the Following Oration.
• Erasmus’s Praise of Folly. an Oration, of Feigned Matter, Spoken By Folly In Her Own Person.
• A Poem On the Foregoing Work.

On the Argument and Design of the following Oration.

• WHATE’ER the modern satyrs o’ th’ stage,
• To jerk the failures of a sliding age,
• Have lavishly expos’d to public view,
• For a discharge to all from envy due,
• Here in as lively colours naked lie,
• With equal wit, and more of modesty,
• Those poets, with their free disclosing arts,
• Strip vice so near to its uncomely parts,
• Their libels prove but lessons, and they teach
• Those very crimes which they intend t’ impeach:
• While here so wholesome all, tho’ sharp t’ th’ taste,
• So briskly free, yet so resolv’dly chaste;
• The virgin naked as her god of bows,
• May read or hear when blood at highest flows;
• Nor more expense of blushes thence arise,
• Than while the lect’ring matron does advise
• To guard her virtue, and her honour prize.
• Satire and panegyric, distant be,
• Yet jointly here they both in one agree.
• The whole’s a sacrifice of salt and fire;
• So does the humour of the age require,
• To chafe the touch, and so foment desire.
• As doctrine-dangling preachers lull asleep
• Their unattentive pent-up fold of sheep;
• The opiated milk glues up the brain,
• And th’ babes of grace are in their cradles lain;
• While mounted Andrews, bawdy, bold, and loud,
• Like cocks, alarm all the drowsy crowd,
• Whose glittering ears are prick’d as bolt-upright,
• As sailing hairs are hoisted in a fright.
• So does it fare with croaking spawns o’ th’ press,
• The mould o’ th’ subject alters the success;
• What’s serious, like sleep, grants writs of ease,
• Satire and ridicule can only please;
• As if no other animals could gape,
• But the biting badger, or the snick’ring ape.
• Folly by irony’s commended here,
• Sooth’d, that her weakness may the more appear.
• Thus fools, who trick’d, in red and yellow shine,
• Are made believe that they are wondrous fine,
• When all’s a plot t’ expose them by design.
• The largesses of Folly here are strown.
• Like pebbles, not to pick, but trample on.
• Thus Spartans laid their soaking slaves before
• The boys, to justle, kick, and tumble o’er:
• Not that the dry-lipp’d youngsters might combine
• To taste and know the mystery of wine,
• But wonder thus at men transform’d to swine;
• And th’ power of such enchantment to escape,
• Timely renounce the devil of the grape.
• So here,
• Though Folly speaker be, and argument,
• Wit guides the tongue, wisdom’s the lecture meant.