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Milton had postponed his poem, in 1641, till "the land had once enfranchished herself from this impertinent yoke of prelatry, under whose inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish." Prelatry was swept away, and he asked for further remand on account of the war.
If there be a plain word in it, and such as is used at home, this "tastes not," say they, "of education among philosophers!" and is counted damnable duncery and want of fancy.
He is a great discomforter of young students, by telling them what travail it has cost him, and how often his brain turned at philosophy, and makes others fear studying as a cause of duncery. He is a man much given to apothegms, which serve him for wit, and seldom breaks any jest but which belonged to some Lacedaemonian or Roman in Lycosthenes.
"Schools are being opened all around us. Numbers of excellent and superior women are coming from the North to engage as teachers of the freed people. Would you be willing to take a school among these people? I think it will be uphill work. I believe it will take generations to get over the duncery of slavery.
'Remember ye not, says Tyndal, 'how within this thirty years and far less, the old barking curs, Dunce's disciples, and like draff called Scotists, the children of darkness, raged in every pulpit against Greek, Latin, and Hebrew? And thus from that conflict long ago extinct between the old and the new learning, that strife between the medieval and the modern theology, we inherit 'dunce' and 'duncery. The lot of Duns, it must be confessed, has been a hard one, who, whatever his merits as a teacher of Christian truth, was assuredly one of the keenest and most subtle-witted of men.
He is a great discomforter of young students, by telling them what travel it has cost him, and how often his brain turned at philosophy, and makes others fear studying as a cause of duncery. He is a man much given to apophthegms, which serve him for wit, and seldom breaks any jest but which belonged to some Lacedemonian or Roman in Lycosthenes.
Thus it came to pass that many times an adherent of the old learning would seek to strengthen his position by an appeal to its famous doctor, familiarly called Duns; while those of the new learning would contemptuously rejoin, 'Oh, you are a Dunsman' or more briefly, 'You are a Duns, or, 'This is a piece of duncery'; and inasmuch as the new learning was ever enlisting more and more of the genius and scholarship of the age on its side, the title became more and more a term of scorn.
They were always in their first garden, reaping harvests of their golden time, among their Flori and their Spici-legia; in Arcadia still, but kings; the ferule of their sway not much harsher, but of like dignity with that mild sceptre attributed to king Basileus; the Greek and Latin, their stately Pamela and their Philoclea; with the occasional duncery of some untoward Tyro, serving for a refreshing interlude of a Mopsa, or a clown Damætas!
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