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The Professors of the University of Louvain declared that they detected forty-three errors in the book; and Agrippa was forced to defend himself against their attacks in a little book published at Leyden, entitled Apologia pro defencione Declamationis de Vanitate Scientiarum contra Theologistes Lovanienses.
"It is indeed so, Chevalier?" she inquired. "Do you note the resemblance?" "Vanitas, vanitate," murmured the youth, who had some scraps of Latin and a taste for airing them. "I can see no likeness no trace of one. Monsieur de Lesperon is well enough, I should say. But Bardelys!" He cast his eyes to the ceiling. "There is but one Bardelys in France."
Mercatura autem, si tenuis est, sordida putanda est; sin magna et copiosa, multa undique apportans, multaque sine vanitate impertiens, non est admodum vituperanda; atque etiam, si satiata quaestu, vel contenta potius; ut saepe ex alto in portum, ex ipso portu in agros se possessionesque contulerit, videtur optimo iure posse laudari.
At different times he would give fifty humorous and apposite reasons for riding a meek-spirited jade of a broken-winded horse, preferably to one of mettle; for on such a one he could sit mechanically, and meditate as delightfully de vanitate mundi et fuga faeculi, as with the advantage of a death's-head before him; that, in all other exercitations, he could spend his time, as he rode slowly along, to as much account as in his study; that he could draw up an argument in his sermon, or a hole in his breeches, as steadily on the one as in the other; that brisk trotting and slow argumentation, like wit and judgment, were two incompatible movements.
Alfonso certainly says that a play upon words is allowable; and, speaking under correction, I should say that he does so on the ground that lying is not a sin against justice, that is, against our neighbour, but a sin against God; because words are the signs of ideas, and therefore if a word denotes two ideas, we are at liberty to use it in either of its senses: but I think I must be incorrect here in some respect, because the Catechism of the Council, as I have quoted it at p. 248, says, "Vanitate et mendacio fides ac veritas tolluntur, arctissima vincula societatis humanæ; quibus sublatis, sequitur summa vitæ confusio, ut homines nihil a dæmonibus differre videantur."
One of his favorite books was "Agrippa de Vanitate Scientiarum," which he especially commended to me, and so set my young brains in a considerable whirl for a long time.
Sordidi etiam putandi, qui mercantur a mercatoribus quod statim vendant, nihil enim proficiant, nisi admodum mentiantur. Nec vero est quidquam turpius vanitate. Opificesque omnes in sordida arte versantur; nec enim quidquam ingenuum habere potest officina. Minimeque artes eae probandae, quae ministrae sunt voluptatum, "Cetarii, lanii, coqui, fartores, piscatores," ut ait Terentius.
Such, in the first half of the sixteenth century, was Cornelius Agrippa a doctor of divinity and a knight-at-arms; secret-service diplomatist to the Emperor Maximilian in Austria; astrologer, though unwilling, to his daughter Margaret, Regent of the Low Countries; writer on the occult sciences and of the famous "De Vanitate Scientiarum," and what not? who died miserably at the age of forty-nine, accused of magic by the Dominican monks from whom he had rescued a poor girl, who they were torturing on a charge of witchcraft; and by them hunted to death; nor to death only, for they spread the fable such as you may find in Delrio the Jesuit's "Disquisitions on Magic" that his little pet black dog was a familiar spirit, as Butler has it in "Hudibras": Agrippa kept a Stygian pug I' the garb and habit of a dog That was his taste; and the cur Read to th' occult philosopher, And taught him subtly to maintain All other sciences are vain.
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