Sont esleuez de ce bas lieu;
C’est par cet Amour que nous sommes
Enfans legitimes de Dieu:
Car l’Ame qui garde en la vie
De son Pere la volonté,
Doit au Pere ès cieux estre vnie
(Comme fille) en eternité.”
And that clever imitation of the “Stultifera Nauis,” the Fool-freighted Ship, of the fifteenth century, namely, the “Centifolium Stultorum,” edition 1707, or Hundred-leaved Book of Fools of the eighteenth, proves how the Satirical may symbolize and fraternize with the Emblematical. The title of the book alone is sufficient to show what a vehicle for lashing men’s faults the device with its stanzas and comment may be made; it is, “A hundred-leaved book of Fools, in Quarto; or an hundred exquisite Fools newly warmed up, in Folio,—in an Alapatrit-Pasty for the show-dish; with a hundred fine copper engravings, for honest pleasure and useful pastime, intended as well for frolicsome as for melancholy minds; enriched moreover with a delicate sauce of many Natural Histories, gay Fables, short Discourses, and edifying Moral Lessons.”
Among the one hundred distinguished characters, we might select, were it only in self-condemnation, the Glass and Porcelain dupe, the Antiquity and Coin-hunting dupe, and especially the Book-collecting dupe. These are among the best of the devices, and the stanzas, and the expositions. Dupes of every kind, however, may find their reproof in the six simple German lines,—p. 171,
“Wer Narren offt viel predigen will,