ll he may be so far as honest nature is concerned. Whatever he says is
sure to have some hidden meaning in it, that would be' highly edifying,
if they themselves understood it. But their own humility comes in here
to prop up his talents; and whatsoever perplexity there may be in
the sense of what he utters, is immediately attributed to learning
altogether beyond their depth.

Love of learning is a conspicuous principle in an Irish peasant; and in
no instance is it seen to greater advantage, than when the object of it
appears in the "makins of a priest." Among all a peasant's good and evil
qualities, this is not the least amiable. How his eye will dance in his
head with pride, when the young priest thunders out a line of Virgil
or Homer, a sentence from Cicero, or a rule from Syntax! And with
what complacency and affection will the father and relations of such a
person, when sitting during a winter evening about the hearth, demand
from him a translation of what he repeats, or a grammatical analysis, in
which he must show the dependencies and relations of word upon word--the
concord, the verb, the mood, the gender, and the case; into every
one and all of which the learned youth enters with an air of oracular
importance, and a pollysyllabicism of language that fails not in
confounding them with astonishment and edification. Neither does Paddy
confine himself to Latin or Greek, for his curiosity in hearing a little
upon all known branches of human learning is boundless. When a lad is
designed for the priesthood, he is, as if by a species of intuition,
supposed to know more or less of everything--astronomy, fluxions,
Hebrew, Arabic, and the black art, are subjects upon which he is
frequently expected to dilate; and vanity scruples not, under the
protection of their ignorance, to lead the erudite youth through
what they believe to be the highest regions of imagination, or the
profoundest depths of science and philosophy.

It is, indeed, in those brilliant moments, when the young priest is
launching out in full glory upon some topic of which he knows not a
syllable, that it would be a learned luxury to catch him. These flights,
however, are very pardonable, when we consider the importance they
give him in the eyes of his friends, and reflect upon that lofty and
contemptuous pride, and those delectable sensations which the appearance
of superior knowledge gives to the pedant, whether raw or trained, high
or low, in this profes