I have said that Coalchester was a very ignorant old town.  I did not mean to imply that there were no M.A.’s there.  In fact, there were quite a number.  You may be sure that if spiritual and intellectual life had its representatives, as we have seen, spiritual and intellectual death had its representatives, too—­by which I don’t mean either to imply that the M.A.’s were dead M.A.’s, dead and buried with Latin over them in the old brassed and effigied church, which was so old and large that it was hardly less conceited than a cathedral.  Spiritual and intellectual death in Coalchester, as elsewhere, was officially represented by the Literary and Philosophical Society, which still unblushingly went on retaining its adjectives, even in the face of its “Transactions,” which seemed mainly composed of treasurer’s reports, with an occasional paper on fossils.

Indeed the one spark of life in the pathetic old society was its real interest in the antediluvian and prehistoric.  For the life that was dead it had a perfect passion, and it sometimes held conversaziones to gaze 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.