More grateful, doubtless, to the princely ears were Erasmus' prognostications of his future. He had no faith in astrology, but he seemed to see in the evident trend of European affairs an accumulation of powers in the hand of duke Philip, which was to be realised in the person of his son Charles. The orator lets himself go in laudation of Maximilian, Ferdinand, Joanna, and Philip himself, with confident prediction of a magnificent future. In fact Maximilian's career was a series of brilliant failures. Ferdinand was in continual dread of Philip and often in open hostility with him. Joanna was already showing traces of that hopeless insanity, aggravated it was said by the cruel frivolities of Philip, which was to taint the house of Habsburg to this day. Finally Philip was to die of disease within two years, without realising any of the schemes of aggrandisement to which his life was devoted. But if Erasmus' prophecy was bad, his scheme of princely morals, as here laid down, was good, and it indicates clearly the bent of his serious thought. A man with his sense of humour--in other words, with his common sense--could not fail to see the discrepancy between the actual Philip and the being whom he had here depicted. When he came to publish his panegyric he found it necessary to defend himself against the charge of falsehood. In a letter[66] to his friend Paludanus, professor of rhetoric at Louvain, he goes at considerable length into the obligation of a writer of such things to tell the truth. He supports his own action by reference to classic panegyrists and lays down the general principle, that one can do more to help a prince by praising him for virtues he has not, than by blaming him for the faults he has. [66] iv., 550. "Just," he says, "as the best of physicians declares to his patient that he likes his colour and the expression of his face, not because these things are so, but that he may make them so. Augustine, so they say, confesses that he told many a lie in praise of emperors. Paul the apostle himself not infrequently employs the device of pious adulation, praising in order that he may reform." The panegyric to Philip, in its published form, was dedicated to Nicholas Ruterius, bishop of Arras. In the dedicatory letter Erasmus professes that this kind of writing was distasteful to him, and defends himself again by the reflection that "there is no way so effectual for improving a prince, as to present to him, under the form of praise, the model of a good prince,--provided only that you ascribe virtues to him and take faults away from him in such wise that you urge him to the one and warn him from the other."