eavy penalty--the
displeasure of pedants and blockheads. It would be sacrilege against the
privileged classes, the Aristocracy of Letters. What! will you affirm
that a profound Latin scholar, a perfect Grecian, cannot write a page of
common sense or grammar? Is it not to be presumed, by all the charters
of the Universities and the foundations of grammar-schools, that he who
can speak a dead language must be _a fortiori_ conversant with his own?
Surely the greater implies the less. He who knows every science and
every art cannot be ignorant of the most familiar forms of speech. Or
if this plea is found not to hold water, then our scholastic bungler is
said to be above this vulgar trial of skill, 'something must be excused
to want of practice--but did you not observe the elegance of the
Latinity, how well that period would become a classical and studied
dress?' Thus defects are 'monster'd' into excellences, and they screen
their idol, and require you, at your peril, to pay prescriptive homage
to false concords and inconsequential criticisms, because the writer of
them has the character of the first or second Greek or Latin scholar
in the kingdom. If you do not swear to the truth of these spurious
credentials, you are ignorant and malicious, a quack and a
scribbler--_flagranti delicto!_ Thus the man who can merely read and
construe some old author is of a class superior to any living one, and,
by parity of reasoning, to those old authors themselves: the poet or
prose-writer of true and original genius, by the courtesy of custom,
'ducks to the learned fool'; or, as the author of _Hudibras_ has so well
stated the same thing--

He that is but able to express
No sense at all in several languages,
Will pass for learneder than he that's known
To speak the strongest reason in his own.

These preposterous and unfounded claims of mere scholars to precedence
in the commonwealth of letters which they set up so formally themselves
and which others so readily bow to, are partly owing to traditional
prejudice: there was a time when learning was the only distinction
from ignorance, and when there was no such thing as popular English
literature. Again, there is something more palpable and positive in
this kind of acquired knowledge, like acquired wealth, which the vulgar
easily recognise. That others know the meaning of signs which they are
confessedly and altogether ignorant of is to them both a matter of fact
and a subject of en