This abuse (and it lasted until the day of his death) did not have any effect. The little man with the long pointed nose, who lived until the age of seventy at a time when the addition or omission of a single word from an established text might cause a man to be hanged, had no liking at all for the popular-hero business and he said so openly. He expected nothing from an appeal to swords and arquebusses and knew only too well the risk the world was running when a minor theological dispute was allowed to degenerate into an international religious war. And so, like a gigantic beaver, he worked day and night to finish that famous dam of reason and common sense which he vaguely hoped might stem the waxing tide of ignorance and intolerance. Of course he failed. It was impossible to stop those floods of ill-will and hatred which were sweeping down from the mountains of Germany and the Alps, and a few years after his death his work had been completely washed away. But so well had he wrought that many bits of wreckage, thrown upon the shores of posterity, proved exceedingly good material for those irrepressible optimists who believe that some day we shall have a set of dykes that will actually hold. Erasmus departed this life in July of the year 1586. His sense of humor never deserted him. He died in the house of his publisher. CHAPTER XIV RABELAIS Social upheavals make strange bed-fellows. The name of Erasmus can be printed in a respectable book intended for the entire family. But to mention Rabelais in public is considered little short of a breach of good manners. Indeed, so dangerous is this fellow that laws have been passed in our country to keep his wicked works out of the hands of our innocent children and that in many states copies of his books can only be obtained from the more intrepid among our book-leggers. This of course is merely one of the absurdities which have been forced upon us by the reign of terror of a flivver aristocracy. In the first place, the works of Rabelais to the average citizen of the twentieth century are about as dull reading as “Tom Jones” or “The House of the Seven Gables.” Few people ever get beyond the first interminable chapter. And in the second place, there is nothing intentionally suggestive in what he says. Rabelais used the common vocabulary of his time. That does not happen to be the common vernacular of our own day. But in the era of the bucolic blues, when ninety percent of the human race lived close to the soil, a spade was actually a spade and lady-dogs were not “lady-dogs.” No, the current objections to the works of this distinguished surgeon go much deeper than a mere disapproval of his rich but somewhat outspoken collection of idioms. They are caused by the horror which many excellent people experience when they come face to face with the point of view of a man who point blank refuses to be defeated by life.