This illustration from the Dutch dykes awakened my suspicions as to who the rider was, and looking at the thin, sensitive, yet satirical lips, the delicate, sharply-cut features, the pallid complexion, and the dark keen eyes I had seen represented in so many portraits, I could not doubt with whom I was speaking. But I did not betray my discovery.
"Dr. Luther has written some good things, nevertheless," he said. "If he had kept to such devotional works as this," returning to me "The Lord's prayer," "he might have served his generation quietly and well; but to expose such mysteries as are treated of here to the vulgar gaze, it is madness!" and he hastily closed the "Galatians." Then glancing at the "Letter to the Nobles," he almost threw it into my hand, saying petulently,—
"That pamphlet is an insurrection in itself."
"What other books have you?" he asked after a pause.
I drew out my last copy of the "Encomium of Folly."
"Have you sold many of these?" he asked coolly.
"All but this copy," I replied.
"And what did people say of it?"
"That depended on the purchasers," I replied. "Some say the author is the wisest and wittiest man of the age, and if all knew where to stop as he does, the world would slowly grow into Paradise, instead of being turned upside down as it is now. Others, on the contrary, say that the writer is a coward, who has no courage to confess the truth he knows. And others, again, declare the book is worse than any of Luther's and that Erasmus is the source of all the mischief in the world, since if he had not broken the lock, Luther would never have entered the door."
"And you think?" he asked.