Ximenes.—­What either of us would have been in that situation does not appear; but, if you are compared to me as a Minister, you are vastly inferior.  The only circumstance in which you can justly pretend to any equality is the encouragement you gave to learning and your munificence in promoting it, which was indeed very great.  Your two colleges founded at Ipswich and Oxford may vie with my University at Alcala de Henara.  But in our generosity there was this difference—­all my revenues were spent in well-placed liberalities, in acts of charity, piety, and virtue; whereas a great part of your enormous wealth was squandered away in luxury and vain ostentation.  With regard to all other points, my superiority is apparent.  You were only a favourite; I was the friend and the father of the people.  You served yourself; I served the State.  The conclusion of our lives was also much more honourable to me than you.

Wolsey.—­Did not you die, as I did, in disgrace with your master?

Ximenes.—­That disgrace was brought upon me by a faction of foreigners, to whose power, as a good Spaniard, I would not submit.  A Minister who falls a victim to such an opposition rises by his fall.  Yours was not graced by any public cause, any merit to the nation.  Your spirit, therefore, sank under it; you bore it with meanness.  Mine was unbroken, superior to my enemies, superior to fortune, and I died, as I had lived, with undiminished dignity and greatness of mind.

DIALOGUE XXII.

LUCIAN—­RABELAIS.

Lucian.—­Friend Rabelais, well met—­our souls are very good company for one another; we both were great wits and most audacious freethinkers.  We laughed often at folly, and sometimes at wisdom.  I was, indeed, more correct and more elegant in my style; but then, in return, you had a greater fertility of imagination.  My “True History” is much inferior, in fancy and invention, in force of wit and keenness of satire, to your “History of the Acts of Gargantua and Pantagruel.”

Rabelais.—­You do me great honour; but I may say, without vanity, that both those compositions entitle the authors of them to a very distinguished place among memoir-writers, travellers, and even historians, ancient and modern.

Lucian.—­Doubtless they do; but will you pardon me if I ask you one question?  Why did you choose to write such absolute nonsense as you have in some places of your illustrious work?

Rabelais.—­I was forced to compound my physic for the mind with a large dose of nonsense in order to make it go down.  To own the truth to you, if I had not so frequently put on the fool’s-cap, the freedoms I took in other places with cowls, with Red Hats, and the Triple Crown itself, would have brought me into great danger.  Not only my book, but I myself, should, in all probability, have been