The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• 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.

A POEM on the foregoing WORK.

• THERE’S ne’er a blade of honour in the town,
• But if you chance to term him fool and clown,
• Straight satisfaction cries, and then with speed
• The time, the place, and rapier’s length’s decreed.
• Prodigious fops, I’ll swear, which can’t agree
• To be call’d what’s their happiness to be:
• Blest Idiots!
• That in an humble sphere securely move,
• And there the sweets of a safe dulness prove,
• Nor envy the proud heights of those who range above.
• Folly, sure friend of a misguided will,
• Affords a kind excuse for doing ill;
• And Socrates, that prudent, thinking tool,
• Had the gods lik’d him would have prov’d a fool.
• Methinks our author, when without a flaw,
• The graces of his mistress he does draw,
• Wishes (if Metempsychosis be true,
• And souls do change their case, and act anew),
• In his next life he only might aspire
• To the few brains of some soft country squire,
• Whose head with such like rudiments is fraught,
• As in his youth his careful grannum taught.
• And now (dear friend) how shall we to thy brow
• Pay all those laurels which we justly owe?
• For thou fresh honours to the work dost bring,
• And to the theme: nor seems that pleasing thing,
• Which he so well in Latin has express’d,
• Less comical in English garments dress’d;
• Thy sentences are all so clearly wrought,
• And so exactly plac’d in every thought,
• That, which is more oblig’d we scarce can see
• The subject by thine author, or himself by thee.

FINIS.