their applause with a smile, and, like the ass, shake their ears, that
they may be thought to understand more than the rest of their neighbors.

But to come to the purpose: I have given you my name, but what epithet
shall I add? What but that of the most foolish? For by what more proper
name can so great a goddess as Folly be known to her disciples? And
because it is not alike known to all from what stock I am sprung, with
the Muses' good leave I'll do my endeavor to satisfy you. But yet neither
the first Chaos, Orcus, Saturn, or Japhet, nor any of those threadbare,
musty gods were my father, but Plutus, Riches; that only he, that is, in
spite of Hesiod, Homer, nay and Jupiter himself, _divum pater atque
hominum rex_, the father of gods and men, at whose single beck, as
heretofore, so at present, all things sacred and profane are turned
topsy-turvy. According to whose pleasure war, peace, empire, counsels,
judgments, assemblies, wedlocks, bargains, leagues, laws, arts, all
things light or serious--I want breath--in short, all the public and
private business of mankind is governed; without whose help all that herd
of gods of the poets' making, and those few of the better sort of the
rest, either would not be at all, or if they were, they would be but such
as live at home and keep a poor house to themselves. And to whomsoever
he's an enemy, 'tis not Pallas herself that can befriend him; as on the
contrary he whom he favors may lead Jupiter and his thunder in a string.
This is my father and in him I glory. Nor did he produce me from his
brain, as Jupiter that sour and ill-looked Pallas; but of that lovely
nymph called Youth, the most beautiful and galliard of all the rest. Nor
was I, like that limping blacksmith, begot in the sad and irksome bonds
of matrimony. Yet, mistake me not, 'twas not that blind and decrepit
Plutus in Aristophanes that got me, but such as he was in his full
strength and pride of youth; and not that only, but at such a time when
he had been well heated with nectar, of which he had, at one of the