Pride, and disrespect as they do now the Moderns.  They are great Hunters of Ancient Manuscripts, and have in great Veneration any thing that has escaped the Teeth of Time; and if Age has obliterated the Characters, ’tis the more valuable for not being legible.  These Superstitious bigotted idolaters of time past, are children in their Understanding all their lives, for they hang so incessantly upon the leading-strings of Authority, that their Judgments like the Limbs of some Indian Penitents, become altogether crampt and motionless for want of use.  In fine, they think it a disparagement of their Learning to talk what other Men understand, and will scarce believe that two and two make four, under a Demonstration from Euclid, or a Quotation from Aristotle.

The World shall allow a Man to be a wise Man, a good Naturalist, a good Mathematician, Politician or Poet, but not a Scholar, or Learned Man, unless he be a Philologer and understands Greek and Latin.  But for my part I take these Gentlemen have just inverted the life of the Term, and given that to the Knowledge of Words, which belongs more properly to Things.  I take Nature to be the Book of Universal Learning, which he that reads best in all or any of its Parts, is the greatest Scholar, the most Learned Man; and ’tis as ridiculous for a Man to count himself more learned than another, if he have no greater Extent of Knowledge of things, because he is more vers’d in Languages, as it would be for an old fellow to tell a young One, his own Eyes were better than the other’s because he reads with spectacles, the other without.

* Impertinence is a Failing that has its Root in Nature, but is not worth laughing at, till it has received the finishing strokes of Art.  A man thro’ natural Defects may do abundance of incoherent foolish Actions, yet deserves compassion and Advice rather than derision.  But to see Men spending their Fortunes, as well as lives, in a Course of regular Folly, and with an industrious as well as expensive idleness running thro’ tedious systems of impertinence, would have split the sides of Heraclitus, had it been his Fortune to have been a Spectator.  It’s very easie to decide which of these impertinents is the most signal:  the Virtuoso is manifestly without a Competitor.  For our follies are not to be measured by the Degree of Ignorance that appears in ’em, but by the study, labour and expence they cost us to finish and compleat ’em.

So that the more Regularity and Artifice there appears in any of our Extravagancies, the greater is the Folly of ’em.  Upon this score it is that the last mentioned deservedly claim the Preference to all others.  They have improved so well their Amusements into an Art, that the credulous and ignorant are induced to believe there is some secret Vertue, some hidden Mystery in those darling Toys of theirs:  when all their Bustling amounts to no more than a learned impertinence and all they teach men is but a specious method of throwing away both Time and Money.