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The poem is imitative in its form, yet is not without traces of an individual thinking and feeling the bird pecks through the shell in it. With this it has a pertness and pedantry which did not even then belong to the character of the author, and which I regret now more than I do the literary defectiveness.
Such was the outline of his literary taste. And was it upon Shakspeare only, or upon him chiefly, that he lavished his pedantry? Far from it. He attacked Milton with no less fervor; he attacked Dryden with a thousand times more. Jeremy Taylor he quoted only to ridicule; and even Locke, the confidential friend of his grandfather, he never alludes to without a sneer.
We understand too well what is due you as our guests to crowd our attentions upon you, but you will allow me to say that already the main facts in your case are known all over our world, and our scientists are discussing the earth and its inhabitants in the great light of the knowledge which you have brought." Foedric spoke with ease, and yet with entire absence of youthful pedantry.
Modern eyes see less of the wit than of the dregs in the books of Greene and his compeers; but the attacks which Nash directed against the Puritans and his rivals were the first English works which shook utterly off the pedantry and extravagance of Euphuism. In his lightness, his facility, his vivacity, his directness of speech, we have the beginning of popular literature.
There is a certain concurrence of various little circumstances which compose what the French call 'l'aimable'; and which, now that you are entering into the world, you ought to make it your particular study to acquire. Without them, your learning will be pedantry, your conversation often improper, always unpleasant, and your figure, however good in itself, awkward and unengaging.
Whereas, if there were less pedantry amongst us, less malice, less falsehood, and less darkness of prejudice, easy it would be to show, that in almost every mode of intellectual power, we are more than a match for the most conceited of elder generations, and that in some modes we have energies or arts absolutely and exclusively our own.
But Seneca is the last man to assume the sage. Except pedantry, nothing is so alien from him as the assumption of goodness. "When I praise virtue do not suppose I am praising myself, but when I blame vice, then believe that it is myself I blame." Thus confident but unassuming, he proceeds to the communication of wisdom.
There is a pedantry among great musicians that deprives their performances of much that is graceful and beautiful. It is the same in the other fine arts, where fashion always prefers cant and slang to nature and simplicity. Dined at Mr. Watson Taylor's, where plate, etc., shone in great and somewhat ostentatious quantity. Strange so clever a fellow should let his wit outrun his judgment!
The pedantry of one class and the colloquial vulgarity of another had their day; the faults of each were strongly contrasted, and better writers kept the mean between them.
He loved the adequate or picturesque word as a miner loves an ingot of gold, yet he was able to display his linguistic stores without incurring the charge of pedantry, much as certain women can carry without offence clothes that would smother a more insignificant personality. "We still have a few minutes to spare," he announced, when he presently reappeared.
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