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Updated: June 27, 2025
Vain to reform Parliament, to invent ballot-boxes, to reform this or that; the real Administration, practical Management of the Commonwealth, goes all awry; choked up with long-accumulated pedantries, so that your appointed workers have been reduced to work as moles; and it is one vast boring and counter-boring, on the part of eyeless persons irreverently called stupid; and a daedalean bewilderment, writing "impossible" on all efforts or proposals, supervenes.
But these may be dismissed as constitutional pedantries. So be it. The Whigs, who made the Constitution, may be pardoned if they have a sneaking regard for their handiwork. Much more astonishing is the fact that no resistance was offered on behalf of wealth and privilege by the classes who have most of both to lose.
Mathematics, perhaps more even than the study of Greece and Rome, has suffered from this oblivion of its due place in civilisation. Although tradition has decreed that the great bulk of educated men shall know at least the elements of the subject, the reasons for which the tradition arose are forgotten, buried beneath a great rubbish-heap of pedantries and trivialities.
The Critique, in spite of some artificialities and pedantries in arrangement, presented a conception never before attained of the rich architecture of reason. It revealed the intricate organisation, comparable to that of the body, possessed by that fine web of intentions and counter-intentions whose pulsations are our thoughts.
The important point in the general training of the artillery is that text-book pedantries for example, in the reports on shooting should be relegated more than hitherto to the background, and that tactics should be given a more prominent position. In this way only can the artillery do really good service in action; but the technique of shooting must not be neglected in the reports.
The State, left to shape itself by dim pedantries and traditions, without distinctness of conviction, or purpose beyond that of helping itself over the difficulty of the hour, has become, instead of a luminous vitality permeating with its light all provinces of our affairs, a most monstrous agglomerate of inanities, as little adapted for the actual wants of a modern community as the worst citizen need wish.
Though the Roxburghe, when it came under the fostering care of the scholarly Botfield, and secured the services of men like Madden, Wright, and Taylor, outgrew the pedantries in which it had been reared, and performed much valuable literary work, yet its chief merit is in the hints its practice afforded to others.
So likewise to his third Parliament, in similar rebuke for their pedantries and obstinacies. Most rude, chaotic, all these Speeches are; but most earnest-looking. You would say, it was a sincere helpless man; not used to speak the great inorganic thought of him, but to act it rather! A helplessness of utterance, in such bursting fulness of meaning.
Yes, there the Tasso, in which we had read together the episode of Clorinda; there the Aeschylus in which I translated to her the "Prometheus." Pedantries these might seem to some, pedantries, perhaps, they were; but they were proofs of that congeniality which had knit the man of books to the daughter of the world. That room, it was the home of my heart.
One, being in haste, did skewer his tongue to his palate with it, I hear; O tempora, O mores! The ancients, reclining godlike at their feasts, how had they spurned such pedantries." As soon as the ladies had disported themselves among the sugar-plums, the tables were suddenly removed, and the guests sat in a row against the wall.
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