confounding them with astonishment and edification. Neither does Paddy
confine himself to Latin or Greek, for his curiosity in hearing a little
upon all known branches of human learning is boundless. When a lad is
designed for the priesthood, he is, as if by a species of intuition,
supposed to know more or less of everything--astronomy, fluxions,
Hebrew, Arabic, and the black art, are subjects upon which he is
frequently expected to dilate; and vanity scruples not, under the
protection of their ignorance, to lead the erudite youth through
what they believe to be the highest regions of imagination, or the
profoundest depths of science and philosophy.

It is, indeed, in those brilliant moments, when the young priest is
launching out in full glory upon some topic of which he knows not a
syllable, that it would be a learned luxury to catch him. These flights,
however, are very pardonable, when we consider the importance they
give him in the eyes of his friends, and reflect upon that lofty and
contemptuous pride, and those delectable sensations which the appearance
of superior knowledge gives to the pedant, whether raw or trained, high
or low, in this profession or the other. It matters little that such
a feeling dilates the vanity in proportion to the absence of real
knowledge or good sense: it is not real, but affected knowledge, we are
writing about. Pride is confined to no condition; nor is the juvenile
pedantry of a youth upon the hob of an Irish chimney-corner much
different from the pride which sits upon the brow of a worthy Lord
Mayor, freshly knighted, lolling with strained dignity beside his
honorable brother, the mace, during a city procession; or of a Lady
Mayoress, when she reads upon a dead wall her own name flaming in yellow
capitals, at the head of a subscription ball; or, what is better still,
the contemptuous glance which, while about to open the said ball, her
ladyship throws at that poor creature--the Sheriff's wife.