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But he was not very indulgent either towards the town pedants, famous in Germany, who, while they are rightly anxious not to alter the text of the masters, carefully suppress every flight of thought, and, like E. d'Albert and H. von Buelow, seem to be giving a lesson in diction when they are rendering a passionate sonata. The singers had their turn.
He even seems to fear that his subject may be considered trivial, and that he may possibly receive 'the censure of being one who busies himself with the mere playthings of antiquity. Dr Percy, when he compiled his invaluable Reliques, had similar apprehensions, which were then not altogether groundless; but it may reasonably be hoped, that the race of pedants, who wondered how a man of learning could be interested in a bundle of old ballads, is now extinct.
Let the pedants, whose business it is to believe lies, or the poets, whose trade it is to invent them, match the King of Prussia With a hero in ancient or modern story, if they can. He disgraces history, and makes one give some credit to romances. Calprenede's Juba does not now seem so absurd as formerly. I have been extremely ill this whole summer; but am now something better.
But whence did the pedants get the Popish nonsense with which they have corrupted youth? Why, from the same quarter from which they got the Jacobite nonsense with which they have inoculated those lads who were not inoculated with it before Scott's novels.
He is a very ungentle reader, for he reads sentence on all authors that have the unhappiness to come before him; and therefore pedants, that stand in fear of him, always appeal from him beforehand, by the name of Momus and Zoilus, complain sorely of his extra-judicial proceedings, and protest against him as corrupt, and his judgment void and of none effect, and put themselves in the protection of some powerful patron, who, like a knight-errant, is to encounter with the magician and free them from his enchantments.
Writers and artists, beautiful women, diplomatists, journalists, pedants, men of science, women of fashion, Châteaubriand and Mme. de Staël, Lamartine and Paul Louis Courier, Mme.
Classical letters therefore remained in the possession of the learned, that is, of the few; and among these, with the exception of Colet and More, or of the pedants who revived a Pagan worship in the gardens of the Florentine Academy, their direct influence was purely intellectual.
Noble spirits show their nobleness by daring the most difficult paths. And even if marriage was but one weed-field of temptations, as these miserable pedants say, who have either never tried it, or misused it to their own shame, it would be a greater deed to conquer its temptations than to flee from them in cowardly longings after ease and safety!
Her influence was incalculable; it was the first time in the history of France that refined taste, intellectuality, and virtue had won importance, influence, and power. It must be remembered that in the first period of the salon there were no blue-stockings, no pedants: these were later developments.
He enjoyed the formidable reputation of being well-read; but it is only just to explain that he was well read chiefly in the archaic sense in the bores and pedants of antiquity.
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