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I am often surprised by the cleverness, and now and again by the stupidity of my dog; and I have similar experiences with mankind. Countless times, in indignation at their incapacity, their total lack of discernment, their bestiality, I have been forced to echo the old complaint that folly is the mother and the nurse of the human race: Humani generis mater nutrixque profecto Stultitia est.
"For instance," Dame Niafer continued, "they tell me that these lovely speeches of yours have produced such an effect upon the Philistines yonder that their Queen Stultitia has proffered an alliance, and has promised to send you light cavalry and battering-rams." "It is true she has promised to send them, but she has not done so."
"Hæc et alia hujusmodi cum protulissem, non valere, nisi eousque, ut decretum sit, si impetrare pacem potuissem vitæ parceretur. Sed non potuit filii stultitia, qui dum jactat opes quæ non sunt, illi quod non erat exigunt." De Vita Propria, ch. x. p. 34. De Vita Propria, ch. x. p. 33.
Among those vehemently passionate, drastically energetic and violent natures of the great ones of his day, Erasmus stands as the man of too few prejudices, with a little too much delicacy of taste, with a deficiency, though not, indeed, in every department, of that stultitia which he had praised as a necessary constituent of life.
Stultitia sat at a bronze reading-desk: she wore rose-colored spectacles, and at her feet dozed, for the while, her favorite plaything, a blind, small, very fat white bitch called Luck. The Queen still thought that an alliance could be arranged against Duke Asmund as soon as public sentiment could be fomented in Philistia, but this would take time.
There is a place where the Laus seems to touch both More and Rabelais; the place where Stultitia speaks of her father, Plutus, the god of wealth, at whose beck all things are turned topsy-turvy, according to whose will all human affairs are regulated war and peace, government and counsel, justice and treaties.
He arrived in London, took up his abode in More's house in Bucklersbury, and there, tortured by nephritic pains, he wrote down in a few days, without having his books with him, the perfect work of art that must have been ready in his mind. Stultitia was truly born in the manner of her serious sister Pallas.
They are happiest of all, he makes Stultitia say: they are not frightened by spectres and apparitions; they are not tortured by the fear of impending calamities; everywhere they bring mirth, jests, frolic and laughter. Evidently he here means harmless imbeciles, who, indeed, were often used as jesters.
Who would to-day dare repeat those maledictions against the bold builders who construct the magnificent trans-Atlantic liners on which, in a dozen days from Genoa, one lands in Boston or New York? "Coelum ipsum petimus stultitia," exclaims Horace that is to say, in anticipation he considered the Wright brothers crazy. Who, save some man of erudition, has knowledge to-day of sumptuary laws?
We have already met with this virtue among those especially set by Spenser to attend on Womanhood. SECTION LXXVI. Third side. Destroyed; but, from the copy, we find it has been Stultitia, Folly; and it is there represented simply as a man riding, a sculpture worth the consideration of the English residents who bring their horses to Venice. Giotto gives Stultitia a feather, cap, and club.
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