There are few scholars. The mob of so-called scholars are unapt peasants caught late, coated over merely with a thin varnish of latin, & reading-room literature, but unlearned & unintelligent; they sleep in the afternoons, read little, & cannot be said to have faith or hope.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, September 24, 2018
Unlearned and Unintelligent
The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. VII: 1838-1842 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 130-131: