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"Not I. Some old pedant in spectacles." "I think not, I am sure not. Here beats a heart I have ever sighed to find, and never found." "Oh, la naive enfant!" cried the count; "comme son imagination s'egare en reves enchantes. And to think that while you talk like an Arcadian, you are dressed like a princess." "Ah, I forgot the Austrian ambassador's. I shall not go to-night.
The bravery of difficulties does so dazzle his eyes that he prosecutes them with as little success as the tailor did his amours to Queen Elizabeth. He differs from a pedant as things do from words, for he uses the same affectation in his operations and experiments as the other does in language.
And if adventurous spirits, like Spenser and Sidney, were for a time misled into the vain attempt to graft exotic forms upon the homely growths of native poetry, they soon saw their mistake and revolted in silence against the ridiculous pedant who preferred the limping hexameters of the Arcadia to Sidney's sonnets, and the spavined iambics of Spenser to the Faerie Queene.
These are all psychological studies, in which the poet gets into the inner consciousness of a monster, a pedant, a criminal, and a quack, and gives their point of view. They are dramatic soliloquies; but the poet's self-identification with each of his creations, in turn, remains incomplete.
Be no forecaster of the dawn; Deem it an asset, and be gay Come, merge to-morrow's misty morn In the resplendence of to-day." And, after all this, it was an easy step, lightly taken, to the things of night. We set out for the strange streets; and there, in the night air, the precocious young pedant, Edgar Doe, became, despite all the new theories, the shy, simple boy he really was.
He gets it, and gives it to the "poor damsel," who is languishing, as he says, and who dies the next month, all the sooner, I have little doubt, for this uncertain and violent drug, with which the meddlesome pedant tormented her in that spirit of well-meant but restless quackery, which could touch nothing without making mischief, not even a quotation, and yet proved at length the means of bringing a great blessing to our community, as we shall see by and by; so does Providence use our very vanities and infirmities for its wise purposes.
Well he might be, for it appeared that the stranger was no less a personage than Peter Rythovius, a doctor of divinity, a distinguished pedant of Louvain, a relation of a bishop and himself a Church dignitary.
Language of this kind boded ill for the "Christian Brethren"; and the choice of Wolsey's successor for the office of chancellor soon confirmed their apprehensions: Wolsey had chastised them with whips; Sir Thomas More would chastise them with scorpions; and the philosopher of the Utopia, the friend of Erasmus, whose life was of blameless beauty, whose genius was cultivated to the highest attainable perfection, was to prove to the world that the spirit of persecution is no peculiar attribute of the pedant, the bigot, or the fanatic, but may coexist with the fairest graces of the human character.
As to the clerks, he pronounced them mere pretenders, not one of whom had ever been among the Indians, nor farther to the northwest than Montreal, nor of higher rank than barkeeper of a tavern or marker of a billiard-table, excepting one, who had been a school-master, and whom he emphatically sets down for "as foolish a pedant as ever lived."
Too many of his portraits give the impression of a sour, supercilious pedant; but the finest of them all that by Jervas shows him as he must have been at his very prime, with a face that was almost handsome, and a look of attractive humor which strengthens rather than lessens the power of his brows and of the large, lambent eyes beneath them.
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