The influence of Erasmus, More, and a few of their illustrious contemporaries, at the revival of learning, contributed a good deal to make extracts from the ancient writers popular among the limited reading community, and to draw the literary thought of the sixteenth century into harmony for a time with that of the later Roman era. This renders it less difficult to understand why the first makers of jest-books thought fit to intersperse their collections with choice passages from Plutarch and the rest. They appealed to a current taste and a sure market. The great Rotterdam wit and philosopher appreciated sallies and strokes of humour which, in a modern English club or at a modern dining table, would scarcely stir a muscle; and he almost killed himself with laughing over the _Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_, in which it is hard to discern where the peculiar piquancy ever lay. It is certainly fair to recollect that we cannot transfer ourselves to the intellectual air in which Erasmus and his friends lived. We are unable to look at things of this kind from their seeing-point. What does not strike us as very droll might strike a Dutchman three centuries since very naturally and very forcibly as being so. We know, of course, how much depends in these cases on a turn of phrase, a trick of pronunciation, or any other subsidiary element; and so far as the _Epistolæ_ are concerned, it must be borne in mind that such a travesty was then a novel experiment in literature, and was apt enough to tickle the fancy of a man who was at once so good a classical scholar and modern Latinist as Erasmus. The taste for selections of Anecdotes, historical, literary, and miscellaneous, must appear more intelligible; and long before anything on the same scale was attempted in England, or even in Southern Europe, the Basle press found a sufficient demand for this sort of light, gossiping literature, freely salted with _gaillardise_, to exhaust at least four editions of a work three volumes strong--namely, the _Convivial Discourses_, a Latin compilation, which lays down the lines on which our own early books of the same class were modelled, and which profess to have been gleaned over the dinner-table, from the private conversation of friends, from ordinary hearsay, and out of books. It is observable that the second and third volumes signify--which the first does not--the special value of the miscellany _Omnibus verarum virtutum studiosis_; which, as many of the examples and anecdotes given are conspicuously licentious, must be taken in a deterrent sense.