I WAS often vexed in my boyhood by seeing, in the Italian comedies, a pedant[1] always the fool of the piece, and the title of schoolmaster[2] had a scarcely more honourable significance among us. For being under their control and care, how could I help being sensitive about their reputation? I tried hard to excuse them by the natural disparity there is between most people and persons of unusual judgement and learning, inasmuch as these and those pursue entirely different courses. But in this I wasted my pains,[3] for the men of widest experience were the ones who held them most in contempt; witness our worthy du Bellay: “But I detest above all things pedantic learning.” (b) And this habit is an ancient one; for Plutarch says that Greek and scholar were words of reproach and scorn among the Romans.[4] (a) Afterward, as I grew older, I found that there was a very great reason for this, and that magis magnos clericos non sunt magis magnos sapientes.[5] But how it can be that a mind rich in the knowledge of so many things does not thereby become more alive and more awake, and that an uncultivated and commonplace intelligence can retain, without improvement, the arguments and opinions of the most excellent minds that the world has produced, by this I am still perplexed.
(b) “To receive so many alien brains and such great and powerful ones,” said a daughter of France, the highest of our princesses,[6] to me, speaking of some one or other, “it must be that his own brain crowds itself into a corner, cramps, and diminishes itself, to make room for the others.” (a) I should be inclined to say that, as plants are choked by too much moisture, (c) and lamps by too much oil, (a) so the action of the mind, through an excess of study and of subjects, being seized and embarrassed by so great a diversity of things, would lose the power of freeing itself, and
