This _Apologia_ is described by Greswell as a serious performance, containing nothing that should be particularly offensive to the monks or to the Roman clergy, unless it be an incidental mention of _La papesse Jeanne_ and a description of certain superstitions that Estienne had observed in his visit to the Church of our Lady of Loretto. The _Apologia_ was, later, prefixed to another issue of a Latin version of _Herodotus_ and was subsequently printed in French in a separate volume under the title _L’apologie pour Hérodote_.[29] The _Apologia_ appears to have been amplified and extended and to have been made the vehicle of a severe attack upon the Roman Hierarchy and a means of exposing the ignorance and vices of its ecclesiastics, the fooleries of their pulpit elocution, the astonishing credulity of the laity instructed by them, and the laxity of discipline and deterioration of manners which seemed to be the inevitable result of a corrupt faith. Greswell is of opinion that the motives which led to this attack are not to be sought for in any imaginary affront which Henry had experienced through the monkish accusations against his _Herodotus_, but that they were rather to be found in the irritation occasioned by the persecutions from which his family had suffered and in his rooted antipathy to the principles of the Church of Rome.[30] Maittaire’s description of Henry’s criticism of the manners and works of the monks recalls certain portions of the _Encomium Moriæ_ of Erasmus. The author’s general line of argument is as follows: The circumstances related by Herodotus in his History ought not to be pronounced fables on account of their seeming want of verisimilitude, as in recent times many things have happened which, though in themselves apparently far less probable than much that Herodotus has recorded, cannot be called in question. It is contended further that it is impossible for men ever to have been so stupid and so gross as Herodotus describes them; but Henry shows by undeniable examples how excessive in all respects was the grossness of many of those who lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, persons who were probably no less degraded than were the classes whose lives are recorded by Herodotus. In the account of the wrong-doings and degradation of later generations, Henry does not spare the monks, who are attacked without mercy, and he speaks with hardly more reserve of the popes themselves. It is difficult to understand why divines of the Sorbonne, whose theological ire had been so bitter against Robert Estienne on account of Greek annotations to the Testament, should have allowed to pass, apparently without a protest, so sweeping a denunciation of the character of the ecclesiastics.