Truth is usually unable to meet falsehood on equal terms; the genuine, for the most part, cannot soil its hands with the foul ammunition of imposture. Sometimes, however, truth is less squeamish. And so, when Pfefferkorn was engaged in slinging slime at Reuchlin, there was suddenly hurled at his own person an avalanche of mud, under which he and his party sank buried from heel to head. The _Letters_ are remorseless in their personalities. But if it be impossible to deny their cruelty and even their occasional coarseness, yet their fame depends less on these scurrilous incidentals than on the essential truth on which they are based. It is the highest merit of satire that it shall not be too obvious. Many who read _Gulliver’s Travels_ enjoy it as a tale, and may not even realize that Swift was lampooning the society and institutions of his day. So long as this element in satire is not too subtle, it adds enormously to the merit of the performance. One recalls such stories as the _Descent of Man_, by Edith Wharton. The hero of that tale is an eminent zoologist, who is moved by the popularity of pseudo-scientific defences of religion to publish an elaborate skit. But he is so successful in concealing his object, that his “Vital Thing” is mistaken for a supreme example of the very type of work he is lashing. The _Letters of Obscure Men_ avoided this danger. They hit the happy mean. They purported to be written by one obscurantist to another, and while the educated at once saw through the dodge, the illiterate (including Pfefferkorn himself) took them seriously. Within a few months of the appearance of the first series of the _Letters_, Sir Thomas More (in 1616) wrote to Erasmus: “It does one’s heart good to see how delighted everybody is with the ‘Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum’; the learned are tickled by their humor, while the unlearned deem their teachings of serious worth.” The foes of humanism--the new learning--are left to expose themselves, in the confidential correspondence which members of the gang are made to carry on in the most excruciatingly funny dog-Latin. As Bishop Creighton put it, they are made to “tell their own story, to wander round the narrow circle of antiquated prejudices which they mistook for ideas, display their grossness, their vulgarity, their absence of aim, their laborious indolence, their lives unrelieved by any touch of nobility.” No wonder Europe laughed, as it did in the following century at the self-revelation of obscuranists in Pascal’s _Provincial Letters_, obviously inspired by the work before us. (Compare Stokes, _Epistolae_, etc., pp. xlvi, xlix). It is not the least amusing feature in the comedy that Richard Steele actually regarded the _Letters of Obscure Men_ as the correspondence between “some profound blockheads” who wrote “in honor of each other, and for their mutual information in each other’s absurdities.” (Stokes, p. viii).