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Updated: June 11, 2025
For many are damnably liquorish tooth'd, everlasting Tattlesters, lazy Ey-servants, salt Bitches, continual Mumblers out of their Pockets, wicked Scolds, lavish Drones, secret Drinckers, stifnecked Dunces, Tyrants over Children, Stinking Sluts, Mouldy Brain'd trugs; hellish sottish Gipsies; nay and sometimes both Whorish and Theevish; and must, therefore, not have come into consideration here, if they did not so especially belong to the disconsolations of Marriage; occasioning many times more troubles and disquiets in a Family, then all the rest of the adversities that may befall it.
I have always had a regard for dunces; those of my own school-days were amongst the pleasantest of the fellows, and have turned out by no means the dullest in life; whereas many a youth who could turn off Latin hexameters by the yard, and construe Greek quite glibly, is no better than a feeble prig now, with not a pennyworth more brains than were in his head before his beard grew.
Nature does not, as far as I can perceive, work with square and compass, or lay on her colors by the rules of royal artists or the dunces of the academies. She eschews regular outlines. She does not shape her forms by a common model. Not one of Eve's numerous progeny in all respects resembles her who first culled the flowers of Eden.
J. Boswell, jun., gives the following reading of the first four lines of the last stanza, not from Dodsley's Collection, but from an earlier one, called The Grove. 'Inglorious or by wants inthralled, To college and old books confined, A pedant from his learning called, Dunces advanced, he's left behind. Bentley, in the preface to his edition of Paradise Lost, says:
You must make yourselves useful, that's what we say too. We are tired of carrying you." And they creaked loudly to emphasize their remarks. "Fair and softly, you black root!" whispered the leaves. "And, if you were not so consequential, you long branches, you would not shout loud, for, after all, it's annoying to have people find out what dunces you are.
Woe to the fools and lunatics who are mad enough to lend me money! From this time onward, I shall never know a weary or listless moment. I shall have always the cheering and inspiring occupation of winning the hearts of trusting and weak-minded dunces, and, by adroit sleight-of-hand, transferring the gold from their pockets to my own." "You are incorrigible," said the king.
It is not every day that the savage envy of aspiring dunces is gratified by the agonies of such a spirit, and the degradation of such a name. The unhappy man left his country for ever.
For three days I have never ceased telling Caroline to go and practise, and she has not attempted to obey me! I shall go out of my mind with one thing or another; I know I shall! Nice dunces they'll grow up." "Go and practise now, Caroline," said Mr. Yorke. "I will put your silkworms up for you." Caroline pouted. "I hate practising."
Mingled with these smatterers, whose attainments just suffice to elevate them from the insignificance of dunces to the dignity of bores, and to spread dismay among their pious aunts and grandmothers, there are, we well know, many well-meaning men who have really read and thought much; but whose reading and meditation have been almost exclusively confined to one class of subjects; and who, consequently, though they possess much valuable knowledge respecting those subjects, are by no means so well qualified to judge of a great system as if they had taken a more enlarged view of literature and society.
In the evening he drove her back again, we did not know where. This was continued several weeks. The boys attending the school were nearly all sons of wealthy parents, and some of them were dunces enough to look with disdain on a student who had to drive a cow. With admirable good nature Watson bore all their attempts to annoy him.
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