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Anybody who is curious for particulars may see the original account in Morton's Register, in the Archbishop's library at Lambeth. A quarter of a century after this there appeared in Germany a book, now called by Catholics an infamous libel, the 'Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum. 'The obscure men, supposed to be the writers of these epistles, are monks or students of theology.
The style and the subject of many of them betray a German origin; and some of the longer pieces so closely resemble, in point, in humor, and in expression, the celebrated "Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum," that there can be little doubt that Ulrich von Hutten, or some one of his coadjutors in that clever satire on the monks and clergy, had a hand in their composition.
He dipped with astonishment into the savage and ultra-Rabelaisian satire of Von Hutter's "Epistola, Obscurorum Virorumf" which set early sixteenth century Europe a-roar with laughter at the discomfited monks; and he cleansed himself from that tainted atmosphere in the fresh air and free English of a splendid Audubon "first" and all the time he was conscious that the Roman watched, watched, watched.
Aristotle's dicta were Nature; and when Benedetti, at Venice, opposed in 1585 Aristotle's opinions on violent and natural motion, there were hundreds, perhaps, in the universities of Europe as there certainly were in the days of the immortal "Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum" who were ready, in spite of all Benedetti's professed reverence for Aristotle, to accuse him of outraging not only the father of philosophy, but Nature itself and its palpable and notorious facts.
He has merely done them into English in a somewhat mechanical way, and one scarcely gets a better notion of the more imaginative ones in his bald reproductions than of the "Iliad" from the analysis of that poem in the "Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum." It seems to require almost as peculiar powers to translate an old ballad as to write a new one. Dr.
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