Note 33
To My Achievements And Attributes from Folly Speaks

The portrait of the wise man is uncomfortably like a grotesque caricature of Erasmus himself, whose self-parody cuts particularly deep in this section. Erasmus did 'fritter away' his youth in acquiring learning. He also worked extremely hard, was thrifty, intermittently impoverished and exceptionally waspish. He was also sickly almost to the point of hypochondria.