Quite often rooms were raided by ecclesiastical authorities in search of this contraband, and Byzantine refugees who were trying to eke out an existence by teaching their native tongue were not infrequently forced to leave the city in which they had found an asylum. In spite of all these many obstacles, Erasmus had learned Greek and in the asides which he added to his editions of Cyprian and Chrysostom and the other Church fathers, he hid many sly observations upon current events which could never have been printed had they been the subject of a separate pamphlet. But this impish spirit of annotation manifested itself in an entirely different sort of literature of which he was the inventor. I mean his famous collections of Greek and Latin proverbs which he had brought together in order that the children of his time might learn to write the classics with becoming elegance. These so-called “Adagia” are filled with clever comments which in the eyes of his conservative neighbors were by no means what one had the right to expect of a man who enjoyed the friendship of the Pope. And finally he was the author of one of those strange little books which are born of the spirit of the moment, which are really a joke conceived for the benefit of a few friends and then assume the dignity of a great literary classic before the poor author quite realizes what he has done. It was called “The Praise of Folly” and we happen to know how it came to be written. It was in the year 1515 that the world had been startled by a pamphlet written so cleverly that no one could tell whether it was meant as an attack upon the friars or as a defense of the monastic life. No name appeared upon the title page, but those who knew what was what in the world of letters recognized the somewhat unsteady hand of one Ulrich von Hutten. And they guessed right; for that talented young man, poet laureate and town bum extraordinary, had taken no mean share in the production of this gross but useful piece of buffoonery and he was proud of it. When he heard that no one less than Thomas More, the famous champion of the New Learning in England, had spoken well of his work, he wrote to Erasmus and asked him for particulars. Erasmus was no friend of von Hutten. His orderly mind (reflected in his orderly way of living) did not take kindly to those blowsy Teuton Ritters who spent their mornings and afternoons valiantly wielding pen and rapier for the cause of enlightenment and then retired to the nearest pot-house that they might forget the corruption of the times by drinking endless bumpers of sour beer.