The remark, to say the least of it, is disingenuous. I have done no
such thing. This general animadversion is only justified by a
reference to the pedantry of the Norman Mallet de Graville--and it is
expressly stated in the text that Mallet de Graville was originally
intended for the Church, and that it was the peculiarity of his
literary information, rare in a soldier (but for which his earlier
studies for the ecclesiastical calling readily account, at a time when
the Norman convent of Bec was already so famous for the erudition of
its teachers, and the number of its scholars,) that attracted towards
him the notice of Lanfranc, and founded his fortunes. Pedantry is
made one of his characteristics (as it generally was the
characteristic of any man with some pretensions to scholarship, in the
earlier ages;) and if he indulges in a classical allusion, whether in
taunting a courtier or conversing with a "Saxon from the wealds of
Kent," it is no more out of keeping with the pedantry ascribed to him,
than it is unnatural in Dominie Sampson to rail at Meg Merrilies in
Latin, or James the First to examine a young courtier in the same
unfamiliar language. Nor should the critic in question, when inviting
his readers to condemn me for making Mallet de Graville quote Horace,
have omitted to state that de Graville expressly laments that he had
never read, nor could even procure, a copy of the Roman poet--judging
only of the merits of Horace by an extract in some monkish author, who
was equally likely to have picked up his quotation second-hand.

So, when a reference is made either by Graville, or by any one else in
the romance, to Homeric fables and personages, a critic who had gone
through the ordinary education of an English gentleman would never
thereby have assumed that the person so referring had read the poems
of Homer themselves--he would have known that Homeric fables, or
personages, though not the Homeric poems, were made familiar, by