generally agreed. Or to what purpose, think you, should I describe myself
when I am here present before you, and you behold me speaking? For I am,
as you see, that true and only giver of wealth whom the Greeks call
_Moria_, the Latins _Stultitia_, and our plain English _Folly_. Or what
need was there to have said so much, as if my very looks were not
sufficient to inform you who I am? Or as if any man, mistaking me for
wisdom, could not at first sight convince himself by my face the true
index of my mind? I am no counterfeit, nor do I carry one thing in my
looks and another in my breast. No, I am in every respect so like myself
that neither can they dissemble me who arrogate to themselves the
appearance and title of wise men and walk like asses in scarlet hoods,
though after all their hypocrisy Midas' ears will discover their master.
A most ungrateful generation of men that, when they are wholly given up
to my party, are yet publicly ashamed of the name, as taking it for a
reproach; for which cause, since in truth they are _morotatoi_, fools,
and yet would appear to the world to be wise men and Thales, we'll even
call them _morosophous_, wise fools.

Nor will it be amiss also to imitate the rhetoricians of our times, who
think themselves in a manner gods if like horse leeches they can but
appear to be double-tongued, and believe they have done a mighty act if
in their Latin orations they can but shuffle in some ends of Greek like
mosaic work, though altogether by head and shoulders and less to the
purpose. And if they want hard words, they run over some worm-eaten
manuscript and pick out half a dozen of the most old and obsolete to
confound their reader, believing, no doubt, that they that understand
their meaning will like it the better, and they that do not will admire
it the more by how much the less they understand it. Nor is this way of
ours of admiring what seems most foreign without its particular grace;
for if there happen to be any more ambitious than others, they may give