Fabius thinks most of them no better, in speech, performance, or gesture, than men out of their minds: mad declaimers. Gregory agrees: I call wise the person whose wisdom lies in deeds, not words. Make the best of him: a good orator is a turncoat, a bad man; an excellent speaker, a thoroughly wicked man. His tongue is for sale. He is nothing but a voice, as someone said of a nightingale: he makes sounds without thought; an extravagant liar, a flatterer, a parasite;

and, as Ammianus Marcellinus has it, a corrupting cheat, who does more harm through fine speeches than another does through bribes. It is easier to avoid someone who traps you with money than someone who deceives you with flattering words. This made Socrates detest and denounce them so strongly.

Fracastoro, a famous poet, freely admits that all poets are mad; so does Scaliger, and who does not? “The fellow is either mad or writing verses,” says Horace, Satires, book 2, satire 7. “I feel like going mad”—that is, composing verses—says Virgil, Eclogue 3, as Servius interprets it. All poets are mad: a company of bitter satirists and slanderers, or else fawning applauders;

and what is poetry itself but, as Augustine says, the wine of error poured out by drunken teachers? You may pass on them all the judgement that Sir Thomas More once passed on the poems of Germanus Brixius: Follies sail aboard the ship; The Furies inhabit the wood.

Budé, in a letter to Lupset, makes civil law the tower of wisdom. Another honours medicine as the quintessence of nature. A third pulls both down and raises the flag of his own particular discipline.

Your haughty critics, grammatical triflers, annotators, and meticulous antiquaries discover every ruined fragment of learning, their cherished absurdities, among the rubbish of old writers. They reckon people fools unless they can find something to blame in another’s writing: anyone who cannot find fault is a fool to them. They correct others and grow heated over a cold cause;

they torment themselves finding out how many streets, houses, gates, and towers Rome had; where Homer came from; who Aeneas’s mother was; about Niobe’s daughters; whether Sappho was a prostitute; whether the egg or the hen came first; and other things which, as Seneca says, you ought to unlearn if you knew them.

What clothes the Roman senators wore, what shoes, how they sat, where they relieved themselves, how many dishes were served at a meal, and with what sauce: details which, according to Luis Vives, it is thoroughly ridiculous for a historian to recount on such an occasion are to these men precious material for painstaking study. They are admired for it, and feel as proud and triumphant over their discovery as if they had captured a city or conquered a province, as rich as if they had found a gold mine.

They shit on and befoul every author with their absurd commentaries, as someone says; they soil and smear a whole company of books and good authors with their ridiculous comments. Scaliger calls these the dungheaps of textual correctors. They show their wit by censuring others, a company of foolish annotators, bumblebees, dor-beetles, or other beetles, spending most of their time among dung;

they rake through all that rubbish and those dungheaps, often valuing a manuscript above the Gospel itself and a treasury of textual criticism above any treasure. With their “delete this,” “others read it this way,” “my manuscript has this,” their latest editions, annotations, corrections, and so on, they make books expensive and themselves ridiculous, and benefit nobody;

yet if anyone dares oppose or contradict them, they go mad and spring to arms. How many sheets they write in their defence, what bitter attacks, what apologies! These are mere gleanings, sheer trifles. But I dare say no more about them, for them, with them, or against them, since I am as exposed to their lash as anyone.

Of these men and the rest of our learned practitioners and philosophers, I will conclude in general that they are a kind of madmen, as Seneca judges them. They raise doubts and quibbles over how to read old authors correctly, and amend their texts, yet will not amend their own lives or teach us to heal our minds, remember our duties, and maintain good faith in human affairs: to keep our wits in order or correct our conduct.

Does someone seem mad to you if he devotes his efforts to these things? Is he not mad who draws geometrical figures with Archimedes while his house is being plundered and his city besieged, while the whole world is ablaze? Or are we not mad, while our souls are in danger—death pursues us, life escapes—to waste our time on trifles, idle questions, and worthless things?

That lovers are mad, I think no one will deny. Even Jupiter is not granted the power to love and be wise at once: Jupiter himself cannot attend to both together. Majesty and love do not agree, Nor dwell together in one place.

When Cicero was urged to marry again, he answered that he could not love and be wise at the same time: be wise and love together. Love is a hell, an incurable force, a mad frenzy; love is madness, a hell, an incurable disease. Seneca calls it ungovernable and insane desire, an uncontrolled and raging lust. I shall discuss this subject separately; meanwhile, let lovers sigh out the rest.

Nevizanus the jurist treats it as an axiom that most women are fools: women’s judgement is weak. Seneca says as much of men, young or old. Who doubts it? Youth is mad, as Elius says in Cicero: foolish young men; old age is scarcely better: doting old men, and so on.

Theophrastus, in his hundred and seventh year, said that he was only then beginning to be wise—only then did his wisdom begin—and therefore lamented his departure. If wisdom comes so late, where shall we find a wise man? Our old people dote at seventy. I would cite more proofs and a better authority, but for now let one fool point at another.