Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/207

Rh characters of those he writes to or against; for pedantry in the pen is what clownishness is in conversation—it is written ill-breeding.

It is pedantry to affect the use of an hard word where there is an easy one, or of a Greek or Latin word, where there is an English one that signifies the very same thing. And these two meanings of the word my Lord Roscommon seems to have hinted in those fine verses of his, which are worth at least half a dozen pages of Dr Bentley's scraps of Callimachus, notes and all:

How Dr Bentley will, on these articles, excuse his familiar treatment of Sir William Temple, and his coarse compliments to me, how he will bring off his Greek and Latin proverbs, his aliene, and negoce, and concede, and repudiating a vernacular idiom, with an