s discuss.

Lavengro is a philological book, a poem if you choose to call it so. Now,
what a fine triumph it would have been for those who wished to vilify the
book and its author, provided they could have detected the latter
tripping in his philology--they might have instantly said that he was an
ignorant pretender to philology--they laughed at the idea of his taking
up a viper by its tail, a trick which hundreds of country urchins do
every September, but they were silent about the really wonderful part of
the book, the philological matter--they thought philology was his
stronghold, and that it would be useless to attack him there; they of
course would give him no credit as a philologist, for anything like fair
treatment towards him was not to be expected at their hands, but they
were afraid to attack his philology--yet that was the point, and the only
point in which they might have attacked him successfully; he was
vulnerable there. How was this? Why, in order to have an opportunity of
holding up pseudo-critics by the tails, he wilfully spelt various foreign
words wrong--Welsh words, and even Italian words--did they detect these
misspellings? not one of them, even as he knew they would not, and he now
taunts them with ignorance; and the power of taunting them with ignorance
is the punishment which he designed for them--a power which they might
but for their ignorance have used against him. The writer besides
knowing something of Italian and Welsh, knows a little of Armenian
language and literature; but who knowing anything of the Armenian
language, unless he had an end in view, would say, that the word sea in
Armenian is anything like the word tide in English? The word for sea in
Armenian is dzow, a word connected with the Tebetian word for water, and
the Chinese shuy, and the Turkish su, signifying the same thing; but
where is the resemblance between dzow and tide? Again, the word for
bread in ancient Armenian is hats; yet the Armenian on London Bridge is
made to say zhats, which is not the nominative of the Armenian noun for
bread, but the accusative: now, critics, ravening against a man because
he is a gentleman and a scholar, and has not only the power but also the
courage to write original works, why did you not discover that weak
point? Why, because you were ignorant, so here ye are held up! Moreover,
who with a name commencing with Z, ever wrote fables in Armenian? There
are two writers of fables in Arm