Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 11, 2025
Silence, bigots; out of the way, dunces! step forward my merry wags! my little pages! give your soft hand to the ladies, and tickle theirs in the centre in a pretty manner, saying to them, "Read to laugh." Afterwards you can tell them some mere jest to make them roar, since when they are laughing their lips are apart, and they make but a faint resistance to love.
But in the main the "Dunciad" was a noble vindication of literature from the herd of dullards and dunces that had usurped its name, a protest against the claims of the journalist or pamphleteer, of the compiler of facts and dates, or the grubber among archives, to the rank of men of letters. That there was work and useful work for such men to do, Pope would not have denied.
But Vanucci struck in, and reminded the gaping gazers of a recent controversy, in which they had, with a unanimity not often found among dunces, laughed Gerard and him to scorn, for saying that men were as beautiful as women in a true artist's eye. "Where are ye now? This is my boy Andrea. And you have all been down on your knees to him. Ha! ha!
John's a dunce, and you know it." "Nobody better, sir: but are there no dunces in the church? And as you are so good as to think that I'm no wilder than my neighbours, you surely will not say that my brother is more a dunce than his neighbours.
But I well remember that he was the compiler and editor of a school newspaper, which made its appearance on Saturdays, when the gingerbread-seller was also to be seen, and that the right of perusal was estimated at the cost of a sheet of gingerbread, the money value of which was in those days the third of a penny. Turning to literary men, we find an imposing array of dunces.
I believe this ingenuous feeling to be very far removed from the wheezy aspirations of windy ignorance, or the spasms for fame which afflict with colic the bowels, empty and flatulent, of sheer scribblers and dunces who take a mean advantage of the invention of printing. Let us be tender of the honest gentlemen who, to quote Cervantes, "aim at somewhat, but conclude nothing."
Would to God I could show this sight to all the pedants of science who spend their useless lives in studying the limbs of the crustaceonidunculae, and are content to know so little about man's glorious body; and to all the State dunces who give sordid blockheads the power to wreck the brains and bodies of wicked men in these the clandestine shambles of the nation.
Now, I have always and always been told that I was a dunce of the dunces. It's not joking me you are, is it, Miss Sherrard?" "No, Kitty; I am in very sober earnest. You have been sent to me to make something of you." "Well, my dear woman, I am afraid you won't make much. The fact is, I am wild through and through. I come of a wild stock. I wish you could see us at home, and Laurie, and "
This offered but a faint hope; still it would take only a few minutes to make the examination, and Lucien's proposal was therefore agreed to. "If we only had a rope," suggested Francois, "we could let ourselves over the cliff, and then the old grizzly might stay there for ever, if she pleased." "Ha!" shouted Basil, as if some plan had suddenly come into his mind, "what dunces we have been!
Ha! ha! ha! dragged out, after a world of labour, a heavy box of a load of brick-bats; not an item of my friend's plate, that was all snug in the coal-hole, where them dunces never thought of looking for it Ha! ha! ha!" "But come, Terry," cried Lord Clonbrony, "I'll pull down your pride. How finely, another time, your job of the false ceiling answered in the hall.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking