Rabelais.—­I wish you were; but I fear the inhabitants of those sublime regions will like your company no better than mine.  Indeed, how Momus himself could get a seat at that table I can’t well comprehend.  It has been usual, I confess, in some of our Courts upon earth, to have a privileged jester, called the king’s fool.  But in the Court of Heaven one should not have supposed such an officer as Jupiter’s fool.  Your allegorical theology in this point is very abstruse.

Lucian.—­I think our priests admitted Momus into our heaven, as the Indians are said to worship the devil, through fear.  They had a mind to keep fair with him.  For we may talk of the giants as much as we please, but to our gods there is no enemy so formidable as he.  Ridicule is the terror of all false religion.  Nothing but truth can stand its lash.

Rabelais.—­Truth, advantageously set in a good and fair light, can stand any attacks; but those of Ridicule are so teasing and so fallacious that I have seen them put her ladyship very much out of humour.

Lucian.—­Ay, friend Rabelais, and sometimes out of countenance too.  But Truth and Wit in confederacy will strike Momus dumb.  United they are invincible, and such a union is necessary upon certain occasions.  False Reasoning is most effectually exposed by Plain Sense; but Wit is the best opponent to False Ridicule, as Just Ridicule is to all the absurdities which dare to assume the venerable names of Philosophy or Religion.  Had we made such a proper use of our agreeable talents; had we employed our ridicule to strip the foolish faces of Superstition, Fanaticism, and Dogmatical Pride of the serious and solemn masks with which they are covered, at the same time exerting all the sharpness of our wit to combat the flippancy and pertness of those who argue only by jests against reason and evidence in points of the highest and most serious concern, we should have much better merited the esteem of mankind.

DIALOGUE XXIII.

PERICLES—­COSMO DE MEDICIS, THE FIRST OF THAT NAME.

Pericles.—­In what I have heard of your character and your fortune, illustrious Cosmo, I find a most remarkable resemblance with mine.  We both lived in republics where the sovereign power was in the people; and by mere civil arts, but more especially by our eloquence, attained, without any force, to such a degree of authority that we ruled those tumultuous and stormy democracies with an absolute sway, turned the tempests which agitated them upon the heads of our enemies, and after having long and prosperously conducted the greatest affairs in war and peace, died revered and lamented by all our fellow-citizens.