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Moreover, as if to force the incongruity upon the notice of the least sensitive of his readers, Spenser followed up the ballad with a poem which is not only practically free from obsolete or dialectal phrasing, but which is composed in the wearisomely pedantic sestina form. This song is attributed to Colin, whose love for Rosalind is again mentioned.
Laws against sacrilege, heresy and blasphemy still ornament our statute-books; but these invented crimes that were once punishable by death are now obsolete, or exist in rudimentary forms only, and manifest themselves in a refusal to invite the guilty party to our Four-o'Clock.
"Primitive methods" we call those studies now, and contemn, gravely or jeeringly, the obsolete practice of "going through" the Bible yearly by reading a given number of chapters every day. We assume that those were mechanical contrivances which, at the best, filled the mind with an undigested mass of Biblical matter and made sacred things trite.
It would imply a considerable knowledge of modern languages and of the classics; a liking for mathematics and physics, especially all that related to electricity and magnetism; a fancy for the occult sciences, if there is any propriety in coupling these words; and a whim for odd and obsolete literature, like the Parthenologia of Fortunius Licetus, the quaint treatise 'De Sternutatione, books about alchemy, and witchcraft, apparitions, and modern works relating to Spiritualism.
This is the old dispute of nominalists and realists, a piece of scholasticism long since obsolete applied to the problems of modern society, and not even worth refutation, least of all worthy of any man who has once correctly recognised the reality of human society, and made it the guiding motive of his thought.
At one end of this garden, through a small angle, forming a cul de sac, or point, where the hedge was joined by one of white thorn, ran the little obsolete pathway alluded to, and as another angle brought them at once upon the spot we are describing, it would so happen that if any one had been found there when they appeared, it would be impossible to leave it if they wished to do so, without directly meeting them, there being no other mode of egress from it except by the footpath in question.
Though this doctrine is now obsolete in the civilized world, it was employed by a large portion of the ancient philosophers to account for the origin of evil. This theory does not, it is true, relieve the difficulty it was designed to solve; but it shows that there was a difficulty to be solved, which would not have been the case if evil could have been ascribed to the Supreme God as its author.
Spenser revived many of his obsolete words, both in his pastorals and in his Faerie Queene, thereby imparting an antique remoteness to his diction, but incurring Ben Jonson's censure, that he "writ no language."
But it is generally agreed, that few men are made better by affluence or exaltation; and that the powers of the mind, when they are unbound and expanded by the sunshine of felicity, more frequently luxuriate into follies, than blossom into goodness. Many observations have concurred to establish this opinion, and it is not likely soon to become obsolete, for want of new occasions to revive it.
And therefore I submit that the following quotation which Professor Flint makes from Professor Jevons, logical as it was when written, must now be regarded as embodying an argument which is obsolete.
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