snare they should have been
able to escape.

No. 173. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 1751.

_Quo virtus, quo ferat error_. HOR. De Ar. Poet. 308.

Now say, where virtue stops, and vice begins?

As any action or posture, long continued, will distort and disfigure the
limbs; so the mind likewise is crippled and contracted by perpetual
application to the same set of ideas. It is easy to guess the trade of
an artizan by his knees, his fingers, or his shoulders: and there are
few among men of the more liberal professions, whose minds do not carry
the brand of their calling, or whose conversation does not quickly
discover to what class of the community they belong.

These peculiarities have been of great use, in the general hostility
which every part of mankind exercises against the rest, to furnish
insults and sarcasms. Every art has its dialect, uncouth and ungrateful
to all whom custom has not reconciled to its sound, and which therefore
becomes ridiculous by a slight misapplication, or unnecessary
repetition.

The general reproach with which ignorance revenges the superciliousness
of learning, is that of pedantry; a censure which every man incurs, who
has at any time the misfortune to talk to those who cannot understand
him, and by which the modest and timorous are sometimes frighted from
the display of their acquisitions, and the exertion of their powers.

The name of a pedant is so formidable to young men when they first sally
from their colleges, and is so liberally scattered by those who mean to
boast their elegance of education, easiness of manners, and knowledge of
the world, that it seems to require particular consideration; since,
perhaps, if it were once understood, many a heart might be freed from
painful apprehensions, and many a tongue, delivered from restraint.

Pedantry is the unseasonable ostentation of learning. It may be
discovered either in the choice of a subject, or in the manner of
treating it. He is undoubtedly guilty of pedantry, who, when he has made
himself master of some abstruse and uncultivated part of knowledge,
obtrudes his remarks and discoveries upon those whom he believes unable
to judge of his proficiency, and from whom, as he cannot fear
contradiction, he cannot properly expect applause.

To this errour the student is sometimes betrayed by the natural
recurrence of the mind to its common employment, by the pleasure which
every man receives from the recollection of pleasing image