"What a joy if they find out who was the mother of Anchises or discover some little word unknown to the vulgar, for instance, 'bubsequa' (a cowherd), 'bovinator' (a brawler), 'manticulator' (a cut-purse), or dig up somewhere a piece of an old rock, cut with worn-out letters—by Jove! what bragging, what triumphs, what glorification! as if they had conquered Africa or taken Babylon."
The grammarians enjoy nothing so much as rubbing each other's back—unless it be roundly abusing each other.
The quibblings of the philosophers are among Folly's choicest products, and from these she runs on naturally to Erasmus' especial black beasts, the scholastic theologians. Quite in the spirit of the Epistolæ obscurorum virorum, but more decently, he enumerates the problems which, so Folly says, chiefly interest them,—
"whether there was any instant of time in the divine generation? whether there was more than one 'filiation' in Christ? is it a possible proposition that the Father could hate the Son? Could God have taken the form of a woman, a devil, an ass, a squash, or a stone? How the squash would have preached, done miracles, hung upon the cross? What would Peter have consecrated if he had celebrated the Eucharist while Christ was still hanging on the cross? etc."