But this is less from choice or perversity, than because he cannot help it and can do nothing else.  He damns a beautiful expression less out of spite than because he really does not understand it:  any novelty of thought or sentiment gives him a shock from which he cannot recover for some time, and he naturally takes his revenge for the alarm and uneasiness occasioned him, without referring to venal or party motives.  He garbles an author’s meaning, not so much wilfully, as because it is a pain to him to enlarge his microscopic view to take in the context, when a particular sentence or passage has struck him as quaint and out of the way:  he fly-blows an author’s style, and picks out detached words and phrases for cynical reprobation, simply because he feels himself at home, or takes a pride and pleasure in this sort of petty warfare.  He is tetchy and impatient of contradiction; sore with wounded pride; angry at obvious faults, more angry at unforeseen beauties.  He has the chalk-stones in his understanding, and from being used to long confinement, cannot bear the slightest jostling or irregularity of motion.  He may call out with the fellow in the Tempest—­“I am not Stephano, but a cramp!” He would go back to the standard of opinions, style, the faded ornaments, and insipid formalities that came into fashion about forty years ago.  Flashes of thought, flights of fancy, idiomatic expressions, he sets down among the signs of the times—­the extraordinary occurrences of the age we live in.  They are marks of a restless and revolutionary spirit:  they disturb his composure of mind, and threaten (by implication) the safety of the state.  His slow, snail-paced, bed-rid habits of reasoning cannot keep up with the whirling, eccentric motion, the rapid, perhaps extravagant combinations of modern literature.  He has long been stationary himself, and is determined that others shall remain so.  The hazarding a paradox is like letting off a pistol close to his ear:  he is alarmed and offended.  The using an elliptical mode of expression (such as he did not use to find in Guides to the English Tongue) jars him like coming suddenly to a step in a flight of stairs that you were not aware of.  He pishes and pshaws at all this, exercises a sort of interjectional criticism on what excites his spleen, his envy, or his wonder, and hurls his meagre anathemas ex cathedra at all those writers who are indifferent alike to his precepts and his example!

Mr. Gifford, in short, is possessed of that sort of learning which is likely to result from an over-anxious desire to supply the want of the first rudiments of education; that sort of wit, which is the offspring of ill-humour or bodily pain; that sort of sense, which arises from a spirit of contradiction and a disposition to cavil at and dispute the opinions of others; and that sort of reputation, which is the consequence of bowing to established authority and ministerial