him is that his Latin and Greek have made him prouder and more vain-glorious than when he left home. (c) He should bring his mind back well filled; he does bring it back only swollen; he has merely inflated it instead of fattening it. These teachers, as Plato remarks of the Sophists,[1] who are closely akin to them, are of all men those who promise to be most useful to mankind; and alone of all men, they not only do not improve what is entrusted to them, as a carpenter does and a mason, but they injure it and exact payment for injuring it. If the rule were followed which Protagoras proposed to his disciples,[2] that they should either pay him his own price, or should swear in the temple what value they set on the profit they had received from his teaching, and according to that should recompense his painstaking — our pedagogues would find themselves disappointed, were they referred back to the asseveration of my own experience.
(a) My Perigordian dialect very wittily calls these dullards[3] “Lettreferits” — to whom letters have dealt a sledgehammer blow, as they say. In truth, they seem in most cases to have sunk even below common sense. For you see the peasant and the cobbler go simply and naturally about their business, talking of what they know; these men, because they would exalt themselves and bluster with the knowledge that floats on the surface of their brains, are always entangling and encumbering themselves. They let fall fine words, but that another may apply them; they are familiar with Galen, but know nothing of disease; they have gone so far as to fill their heads with laws, but none the more have they apprehended the chief point of the case; they know the theoric of every thing — find one of them who can put it in practice. I have seen, in my house, a friend of mine, in intercourse with such a man, concoct, by way of pastime, a farrago of nonsense, incoherent sentences, made up of borrowed phrases, — save that it was often interlarded with words appropriate to their discussion, — and thus keep this dunce debating for a whole day, thinking always that he was answering the arguments which were brought against
