Another letter describes a great intellectual riddle, which was argued for four days at the School of Logic at Louvaine. A certain Master of Arts had taken out his degree at Louvaine, Leyden, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, Padua, and four other universities. He was thus a member of ten universities. But how _could_ a man be a member of ten universities? A university was a body, and one body might have many members; but how one member could have many bodies, passed comprehension. In such a monstrous anomaly, the member would be the body, and the universities the member, and this would be a scandal to such grave and learned corporations. The holy doctor St. Thomas himself could not make himself into the body of ten universities. The more the learned men argued, the deeper they floundered, and at length gave up the problem in despair. Again: a certain professor argues that Julius Caesar could not have written the book which passes under the name of 'Caesar's Commentaries,' because that book is written in Latin, and Latin is a difficult language; and a man whose life is spent in marching and fighting has notoriously no time to learn Latin. Here is another fellow--a monk this one--describing to a friend the wonderful things which he has seen in Rome. 'You may have heard,' he says, 'how the Pope did possess a monstrous beast called an Elephant. The Pope did entertain for this beast a very great affection, and now behold it is dead. When it fell sick, the Pope called his doctors about him in great sorrow, and said to them, "If it be possible, heal my elephant." Then they gave the elephant a purge, which cost five hundred crowns, but it did not avail, and so the beast departed; and the Pope grieves much for his elephant, for it was indeed a miraculous beast, with a long, long, prodigious long nose; and when it saw the Pope it kneeled down before him and said, with a terrible voice, "Bar, bar, bar!"' I will not tire you with any more of this nonsense, especially as I cannot give you the really characteristic parts of the book. I want you to observe, however, what Sir Thomas More says of it, and nobody will question that Sir Thomas More was a good Catholic and a competent witness. 'These epistles,' he says, 'are the delight of everyone. The wise enjoy the wit; the blockheads of monks take them seriously, and believe that they have been written to do them honour. When we laugh, they think we are laughing at the style, which they admit to be comical. But they think the style is made up for by the beauty of the sentiment. The scabbard, they say, is rough, but the blade within it is divine. The deliberate idiots would not have found out the jest for themselves in a hundred years.' Well might Erasmus exclaim, 'What fungus could be more stupid? yet these are the Atlases who are to uphold the tottering Church!'