Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/213

Rh his poor reader, and make himself terrible in the way of learning. "As Aristotle says in his lost Treatise of the Sicilian Government," says the Doctor: though that Treatise be so far lost that Aristotle did really never write it. And agen he tells us what Monsieur de Méziriac has done in his Life of Æsop, and yet owns, in the very next line, that he never met with this book, but only guessed what was in it. He produces the unknown authors Diodorus transcribed, as so many witnesses on his side, and in another place he gives a very particular account of what Aulus Gellius said in a lost chapter, not from any other writer that had quoted it, but merely by dint of conjecture.

These are all the marks and moles of pedantry that I can now stay to point out to the Doctor: if he be still at a loss to know what the pedant's character is, and where to apply it, I refer him to a passage in Bruyere where I think this matter is very succinctly and fully handled. "There are," says he, "in learning, as in war, a sort of inferior and subaltern officers, men who seem made only for registers and magazines to store up the productions of better writers. Collectors they are, transcribers, plagiaries; they