at it through microscopes. Occasionally it would waken up to literature
with a paper on Akenside. In everything that didn't in the least matter
some of these mild old gentlemen were genuinely learned. Not that they
hadn't read the great poets, even in the original Greek, Latin, and
Italian. Poets in dead and foreign languages were a form of fossils, and
English poets--with that divine bloom upon them!--they had a way of
fossilising by spectacles, so that they never read them alive. Thus they
had never read Shakespeare even in the original.

Once, long ago in Coalchester, a hundred years ago, there had been a
little circle of elegant literati, connoisseurs of literature and
art,--men, so far as men of that age might be, genuinely, if timidly and
old-maidishly, affectionate towards belles-lettres; men who had got so
far as to appreciate the freshness of an Elizabethan song; minor Bishops
Percy; and such lavender is the true love of anything that their
memories still hung about the walls of the old Lyceum along with their
portraits; while so necessary are great names for little towns to boast
of, that the compiler of the local gazetteer implied that Coalchester
glowed at night with quite a lustre from their names. Besides, they
proved very useful in damping young men. And yet you wouldn't know their
names if I were to write them--as I would rather like to do.

The learned Dr. Sibley, he wrote a pleasant little essay on "Taste," you
know, with a few additional notes on chiaroscuro; and then there was
the learned Dr. Ambrose, who wrote quite a pretty little treatise on
Song-writing.

No! Of course you won't know any of them. Yet they were all once, and
are still, "The Learned." You'll never hear Theophilus Londonderry
spoken of as that, I'm afraid.