astounding structures such as the Egyptian pyramids, labyrinths, and sphinxes, which a company of crowned asses vainly built to display their wealth, though neither the architect nor the king responsible, nor their use or purpose, is yet known;

to dwell on their hypocrisy, fickleness, blindness, rashness, insane recklessness, fraud, cheating, malice, anger, shamelessness, ingratitude, ambition, gross superstition; an age corrupted and filthy with flattery, as in the time of Tiberius; such base flattery, astonishing, parasitical fawning and wheedling, brawls, conflicts, desires, and disputes: it would take an expert Vesalius to dissect every part.

Shall I say it? Jupiter himself, Apollo, Mars, and the rest were foolish; and Hercules, conqueror of monsters, who subdued the world and helped others, could not help himself in this: he too went mad in the end. Where can anyone walk, whom can he speak with, in what province or city, without meeting Mr Delirious, Hercules Raging, Maenads, and Corybants?

Their speech tells the same story: people born from mushrooms; or else they trace their ancestry to those whom Samson struck with an ass’s jawbone, or to the stones of Deucalion and Pyrrha. For we are a hard race, we are marble; we are stone-hearted and show too much of our parent stock;

as though they had all heard the enchanted horn of Astolfo, the English duke in Ariosto, whose every blast drove its hearers mad and left them ready to kill themselves from fear; or had landed at the mad harbour in the Black Sea, Mad Daphne, with its hidden power to derange the mind;

They are a company of scatterbrains and afternoon drunkards; it is always the midsummer moon, and the dog days last all year. They are all mad. Whom, then, shall I except? Ulrich von Hutten’s Nobody. For nobody is wise at every hour; nobody is born without faults; nobody is free of guilt; nobody lives content with his lot; nobody is wise in love; nobody is good; nobody is wise; nobody is happy in every respect; and so on.

So Nicholas Nobody, or Monsieur Nobody, shall go free. What Nobody can do, nobody can tell. Whom shall I except next? Those who keep silent: the person who says little is wise. There is no better way to avoid folly and madness than keeping quiet.

Whom third? All senators and magistrates; for all fortunate men are wise, and conquerors brave, and so are all great men. It is no good playing with gods. They are wise by authority, good by office and rank; they may be thoroughly wicked with impunity, some say. We must not speak about them; it would not be proper. As far as I am concerned, let everything be white from this moment: I will think no ill of them.

Whom next? The Stoics? The Stoic sage, and he alone, is subject to no disturbance of mind. As Plutarch mockingly describes him, torture does not trouble him, fire does not burn him, his adversary cannot defeat him, his enemy cannot sell him. Though wrinkled, half-blind, toothless, and deformed, he is supremely beautiful and godlike, a king in his own imagination, though not worth a groat.

He never loses his judgement, never goes mad, never becomes sad or drunk, because virtue cannot be taken away: so Zeno maintains, on account of the firmness of his understanding. But he was mad to say so. This fellow needs Anticyra’s chisel or a pickaxe; he needs a hole bored in his head, and so do all his companions, however wise they would like to seem.

Chrysippus himself freely concedes that at certain times and on certain occasions they are fools like everyone else: he says that virtue can be lost through drunkenness or melancholy. It may be lost through drunkenness or melancholy; the wise man may sometimes be mentally unsettled like the rest: supremely wise, except when troublesome phlegm gets in the way.

I ought here to except some Cynics: Menippus, Diogenes, and Crates of Thebes. Or, coming down to our own times, that all-knowing brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, the only people who are wise: those great theologians, statesmen, philosophers, physicians, scholars of language, practitioners of the arts, and so on, whom Saint Bridget, Abbot Joachim, Leicenbergius, and such inspired spirits have prophesied and promised to the world;

if, that is, any such people exist—Heinrich Neuhusius doubts it, as do Valentinus Andreae and others—or if there is an Elijah the Artificer, their Paracelsian master. Though Libavius and many others ridicule and criticize him, some insist that he is the renewer of all the arts and sciences, the reformer of the world, and alive at this very moment;

for so Johannes Montanus Strigoniensis, that great champion of Paracelsus, argues and confidently asserts: a supremely godlike man, the very essence of wisdom, wherever he may be. For he, his brotherhood, his friends, and the rest are all betrothed to wisdom, if we may believe their disciples and followers.

I must of course except Lipsius and the Pope, and strike their names from the catalogue of fools. For besides Dousa’s flattering testimony— From the rising sun to the Maeotian marshes, No one can claim to equal Justus—

Lipsius says of himself that he was indeed the teacher of the human race, through speech and writing: a grand lord, a master, a tutor to us all. He boasts of how, for thirteen years, he sowed wisdom in the Low Countries, as the philosopher Ammonius once did in Alexandria: literature together with humane learning, and wisdom with practical judgement. High priest of wisdom, he shall be the eighth sage.