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With what shame must thou have seen her rambling about from court to court deprived of her royal dignity, debased into a pedant, a witling, a smatterer in sculpture and painting, reduced to beg or buy flattery from each needy rhetorician or hireling poet! I weep to think on this stain, this dishonourable stain, to thy illustrious blood!
In a pleasant book about a school- class club, Colonel Fergusson has recently told a little anecdote. "I should think there would be a number of interesting bi-products," said a smatterer at my elbow; but for me the tale itself has a bi-product, and stands as a type of much that is most human.
We find in his works no evidence that he had read the masters in political economy; not even Adam Smith, whose reputation was at its height during the' first half of his public life. In history he was the merest smatterer, though it was his favorite reading, and he was always talking about Sparta, Athens, and Rome. The slenderness of his far tune prevented his travelling.
By the first, many a smatterer acquires the reputation of a man of quick parts; by the other, many a dunderpate, like the owl, the stupidest of birds, comes to be considered the very type of wisdom. This, by the way, is a casual remark, which I would not, for the universe, have it thought I apply to Governor Van Twiller.
He was a smatterer of that most dangerous kind, who feel certain they have arrived at truth. Like so many other children of the eighteenth century, he rejected the past with disdain, but was blindly credulous of the future; and was ready to embrace an absurdity if it came in a new and scientific shape.
Imagine the paradox, this babe, an ascetic and this worldling, a sybarite, meeting upon a common ground! For I really believe she was sincere about her self-sufficiency. Whatever her tastes, she's no weakling." "But she's trivial, a smatterer, a decadent " "And handsome," laughed Ballard. "Don't forget that." "Mere looks will never ensnare Jerry."
If we could call up the first of human beings, if we could call up Newton, and ask him whether, even in those sciences in which he had no rival, he considered himself as profoundly knowing, he would have told us that he was but a smatterer like ourselves, and that the difference between his knowledge and ours vanished, when compared with the quantity of truth still undiscovered, just as the distance between a person at the foot of Ben Lomond and at the top of Ben Lomond vanishes when compared with the distance of the fixed stars.
But the worst of it is that all efforts in this direction have generally ended in producing a "smatterer," whose theories are baffled by constant disappointment, and whose worldly prosperity is lessened by his mistaken experiments. Successful farming implies, first of all, steady and dogged hard work, coupled with prudent and watchful skill.
None of them contained any thing remarkable, so far as I, who was indeed a smatterer in geography, was able to perceive, till I came to the end, when I noticed a map, whose prototype I was wholly unacquainted with. It was drawn on a pretty large scale, representing two islands, which bore some faint resemblance, in their relative proportions, at least, to Great Britain and Ireland.
Before these learned pundits, one member laid the following ingenious problem: "What would be the result of putting a pound of potassium in a pot of porter?" "I should think there would be a number of interesting bi-products," said a smatterer at my elbow; but for me the tale itself has a bi-product, and stands as a type of much that is most human.
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