Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/283

Rh else assisted me, either in that work, or in this: so that I alone am accountable for the errors in them both

[pp. xcvii and xcviii]

7. Another mark, he says, of a pedant, is "an itch of contradicting great men upon very slight grounds." I must own, that I am sometimes forced in my writings to contradict great men, by correcting such oversights as they made through inadvertency or want of information. But then I do it without any diminution to their character; and if that modesty be observed, the contradicting them in this way deserves the highest commendation, and is such a sort of pedantry as the Examiner and his Director will never be accused of. But the instance he charges me with, is my brisk censure of Grotius and Scaliger, for not knowing the measure of an anapaestic verse: and whether I did that upon very slight grounds, this very answer will shew. But let us see the Examiner's words here, if perhaps this last character of a pedant may not prove to be his own picture: "When 'tis ," says he, "as I shall shew, that the Doctor would never have censured 'em if he had