“ The ship of fools appears, indeed, in the frontispiece with disordered rigging and motley crew all jabbering and gesticulating, but we do not follow the incidents of her voyage, or learn how those on board comported themselves on the high-seas, passing instead to a descriptive catalogue of the various classes of men whose departure from the ways of wisdom might entitle them to wear the cap and bells, distinctive of her passengers. ”

“ The figure holding a balance in his hand, the heavier scale containing a turreted feudal castle, the lighter the celestial sphere, emblazoned with sun, moon, and stars, is emblematical of the folly which consists in preferring temporal to eternal happiness.
In another woodcut a fool is seen riding on a cray-fish, his hand pierced by a reed he has leant on, his mouth gaping for a dove flying towards him ready roasted; and the text explains this allegory as signifying those who expect rewards they have not earned either in this world or the next. ”

“ The famous satire of Sebastian Brant no doubt owed its universal and unprecedented popularity to the happy inconsistency of its author, who, while adopting for it the form of an allegory, out of deference to the prevailing fashion of the age, immediately cast aside the restrictions imposed by symbolical composition, and set himself in downright earnest and straightforward simplicity to stigmatize the vices of his contemporaries. ”

“ Unadorned human nature was considered too mean and common a thing to occupy the attention of author or public; the stage was filled by impersonal abstractions who discoursed in dialogue as insipid as it was edifying poets personified nature instead of describing her; painters were not satisfied to portray a woman without symbolizing a virtue; Folly was held up to derision, and Wisdom spoke her trite moral, amid the mummeries of carnival masquerade ”

“ The figure who appears complacently playing the bagpipes, while a harp and lute lie neglected at his feet, is, we find, intended for those empty-minded prattlers who prefer their own frivolous babble to anything better or more improving. Samson, shorn by Delilah, is, as we see at a glance, a type of that numerous class who cannot keep their own counsels; while the group round a table with cards and dice, the vain fool contemplating himself in a mirror, and the officious one who runs to put out the fire in his neighbor's house, leaving his own in flames, point equally obvious morals. ”

“ The carver who in helping his neighbors selects the worse portions for them, reserving the better for himself, he who turns the dish round when it is set before him in order to take a leisurely survey and choose the most inviting morsels, the man who eats too fast, speaks too loud, or monopolizes the general conversation, all come in for their share of reprobation; and these trifling instances show how narrowly the satirist scanned human nature, and how keenly he ridiculed its smallest failings and weaknesses. ”

“ Thus if Sebastian Brant's sententious wisdom helped nothing to the observance of the Decalogue, it might at least hinder breaches of the social code; and if gamesters, cheats, and drunkards were impervious to his ridicule, the man who inconvenienced his neighbors at dinner might fear to find its shafts borrowed by their tongues, in revenge for his greediness or garrulity. At any rate, our author did his best to deprive wickedness of its prestige by classing it with folly, and so far deserved well of his generation. ”

“ Some of these are conceived in a highly poetic and imaginative spirit, like that which personifies the presumptuous and reckless fool as a man looking idly out of an upper window, while his roof is smitten by the thunderbolts of heaven. ”

“ The fools are struggling in the waves, or seeking refuge in a crazy boat, while another, freighted with a pious crew in various attitudes of devotion, and labelled as the bark of Peter, is drawn to the shore by the saint himself, his key serving very opportunely as a boat-hook. ”

“ Barclay's "Ship of Fools" is chiefly interesting as a study of language, being the only important work in English verse produced in the interval between Chaucer and Spenser. It is written in strong idiomatic vernacular, and embodies many popular proverbial phrases still in use, and here found for the first time in literature, as the earliest collection of English proverbs - that of Heywood - was not published till 1546. Thus we read in its pages, "When the stede is stolyn to shyt the stable door." "Better is a frend in courte than a peny in purse." ”

“ There is both humor and vigorous design in the variety of attitudes and expression assigned to the aspiring quadrupeds, and the moral is pointed by a skull and gravestone in the foreground, suggesting the common end of all Fortune's changes. It is worthy of remark that this design is almost a facsimile, with the substitution only of asses for apes and dogs, of the wheel of fortune as represented on the old tarots, or emblematical playing-cards, although they are not supposed to have been much used in Germany. ”

“ Parables or apologues have furnished in all nations the primitive exercise of the inventive faculty; and their universal use, whether as a vehicle of instruction or a source of entertainment, proves their power of appealing to some common instinct of humanity. Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" is the last of this class of compositions which has attained to anything like widespread popularity, but in the preceding centuries all productions addressed to the taste of the masses, whether in poetry, art, or drama, took this symbolical or representative form. ”

“ But the irrepressible human element thus studiously excluded from the higher realms of art was apt to assert itself in the most unforeseen directions, and the secondary episodes in which it was admitted, as it were on sufferance, developed an astonishing tendency to growth and expansion quite out of proportion to the humble place assigned to them. ”

“ The lesson of remaining uninfluenced by empty and foolish talking is enforced by a singular image: a bell standing on the ground, mouth upwards, has a fox's brush in the place of a clapper, to signify at once the impotence and malignity of evil speakers; while the hopelessness of attempting to stop their mouths by kindness is indicated by a man taking flour with both hands out of a sack. ”

“ We may be sure that it is the failings prevalent among the poet's fellow-citizens that are here enumerated, and that the good burghers of Basle and Strasburg easily recognized the errors of their neighbors in pages where they never detected any allusion to their own.
Brant, thus outraging the prescriptions of high art as understood in the fifteenth century, wrote a poem which made an epoch in German literature, marking the transition from the formal conventionalities of mysticism to the free interpretation of homely nature. ”

“ The fifteenth century would seem to have been no whit behindhand in the tricks of trade — a special section is devoted to their reprobation; and false weights, short measure, light money, copper gilt to pass as gold, inferior furs dyed in imitation of real, lame horses fitted with padded shoes to appear sound, are enumerated among the forms of deceit in vogue. ”

“ Like Dante, his dream of an ideal society was based on the dazzling conception of a restored and perfected Roman Empire, and he dedicated a number of works both in prose and verse to the service of the hero of his Utopia, Maximilian, king of the Romans, under whom he hoped to see his scheme for the reunion of Christendom carried into effect. ”

“ The way in which the calamity shattering his dwelling is made visible, in the shape of a hammer wielded by a gigantic hand stretching from the clouds, is not without a certain rude force of expression, while its effects are shown in the flames bursting from doors and windows on the ground floor. ”

“ It is divided into one hundred and ten chapters, each describing a separate type of human folly, and each illustrated by a woodcut, of which the poet is supposed to have suggested the design to the artist. In the execution of these illustrations critics believe they can detect the work of five several hands, representing as many different degrees of skill, and some are attributed to Martin Schön of Colmar. They are full of spirit and vigor, and the action in them is conveyed with such dramatic efficiency that they have the interest of a series of scenes in a comedy of manners. ”

“ If there were any attempt at logical arrangement in the poem, this catastrophe would naturally bring it to a conclusion, instead of occurring, as it does, at a comparatively early stage. The same absence of constructive skill is manifest throughout, and the various vices and failings stigmatized by the author are jumbled indiscriminately together, without any pretence, at classification or general plan, while some of the chapters are so nearly repetitions of subjects already dealt with, that the same woodcut does duty a second time. ”

“ Among gentlefolk he evidently thinks the correct thing would be to call for a fresh glass, though he considerately remarks that from a poor man such a costly piece of refinement would be too much to expect, and he would apparently give him a dispensation for some slight deviation from the strict laws of good breeding. ”

“ Party feeling in society still ran high on the points debated by the fathers, and the university was divided into two sects, the Realists, headed by Johannes à Lapide, and the Nominalists, a more advanced school of thinkers, who advocated philosophical progress and ecclesiastical reform. ”

“ Some, he says, are too nice to help themselves to salt with their fingers, but he for his part would prefer seeing a clean hand thrust into the salt-cellar to a knife, which, for aught he knows, may have just been used in skinning a cat. ”