trait before them? In the whole range of the
lence.[subnote 1] Hence it need not surprise us, when we learn from the biographers of the poet, Gray, that when at Cambridge, he would sometimes divert himself with the ignorance too often found at home in dwellings set apart for the extension of knowledge, and by courtesy associated with Apollo and the Muses, as well as the genii of sundry sciences: a proficiency in which, either real or nominal, qualifies for the imposing distinction of Artis Magister.—That the University Commissioners of Longitude, notwithstanding their official gowns, would have drawn some sarcastic glances from him who awakened 'Pindar's rapture on his Iyre,' is a point we waive; but if these Professors, howsoever designated in their several degrees, were not men of mediocrity—common-place characters, whom each season turned out by dozens, scores and hundreds[subnote 2] from those national seminaries,[subnote 3] could party animosity have shown them so devoid of candour? could it have rendered their visuals so opaque as not to discern the distinction which George 3rd so
- ↑ Fielding in the sequel of the bird batting adventure, in Joseph Andrews, has a severe stroke at the deficiency of those clergymen who, after leaving college, by associating daily with fox-hunters, or the best (illiterate) shots, and disputing on the pedigree of Miss Slouch, while the horses of Peleus' Son are totally forgotten, have let their former intellectual armour grow so rusty, for want of use, that he introduces one who did not know there had been such an author as Æschylus. Consonant with this almost incredible imputation, it may be observed that a constitutional predilection for books is not always visible in the physiognomies of graduates who duly conform to the rules of Alma Mater.
- ↑ We have somewhere met with the name of Professor Hornaby joined to those of certain learned men in discussing the precession of the equinoxes, or some other astronomical data, and far be it from us to withhold his due merit from that gentleman, if he excelled in those elaborate disquinitions, but it was at the expense of an ignorance of common things; for he did not know that, in reckoning by the chronometer, ships always took their departure from the last land they saw, 'which never could be Greenwich.'
- ↑ When Mr. Croker, in 1818, introduced his bill for consolidating the
