The descent was natural enough. As noble lords and ladies patronized fools who figured in the lists, so common people welcomed them at their village festivals. Some districts kept their own fools. There were others who raised to that distinction any “poor natural” of the locality, out of whose peculiarities or infirmities it was possible to extract something to laugh at. In some places, fools were hired on great occasions, to amuse a company unable to amuse itself. In the sixteenth century this appears to have been the case at notable Greek weddings in the Levant. Schweigger describes the nuptial feast (at which he was present) in 1578, of a patriarchal protonotary with a certain Irene Moschini, at which all the jollity was produced by a Jewish fool and other hirelings of the like amusing vocation. The Jews themselves employed jesters to enliven their own wedding feasts. This was the case in Silesia as late as the last century. The company sat gravely enough till the indispensable jokers and tumblers were introduced, and _then_ the fun was of the oddest, if not most refined, sort. But the Silesian Jews were a simple people, unacquainted with the mendacity and dreariness of wedding-breakfast speeches. Their fools had full license to abuse truth, but not to be dreary. In passing now to the fools of different courts and localities, I will, by the way, notice a class which may claim precedence, by right of sex. I therefore proceed to say a few words of the FEMALE FOOLS. THE FEMALE FOOLS. I do not know any earlier instance of a retained female fool than in the case of the wife of Seneca, who kept in her house one named Harpaste, and whom the philosopher describes as _fatua_, adding that he himself found no pleasure in such objects; and (as I have quoted in another page) that if he found it necessary to take delight in contemplating a fool, he had not far to go,--having only to look in a mirror. Harpaste may have been retained out of charity, for she was so witless that, becoming suddenly blind, she was not conscious of her calamity; but, remarking how very dark it was in the house, asked the pædagogus to lead her out-of-doors. Seneca, it will be remembered, loved folly as little in a philosopher as in the fool by vocation. “He,” observes the son of the Cordovaner, “who duly considers the business of life and death, will find that he has little time to spare from that study. And yet, how we trifle away our hours upon niceties and cavils! Will Plato’s imaginary ideas make me an honest man?... _A mouse is a syllable, but a syllable does not eat cheese; therefore a mouse does not eat cheese?_ Oh, these childish follies!... We are jesting, when we should help the miserable,--ourselves, as well as others.”