ics, _Sprat_, the historian of the Royal
Society, observes, "that the lovers of that cloudy knowledge
boast that it is an excellent instrument to refine and
make subtle the minds of men. But there may be _a greater
excess in the subtlety of men's wits_ than in their
_thickness_; as we see those threads, which are of too fine
a spinning, are found to be more useless than those which are
homespun and gross."--_History of the Royal Society_, p. 326.

In the history of human folly, often so closely connected with
that of human knowledge, some of the schoolmen (the
commentators on Aquinas and others) prided themselves, and
were even admired for their impenetrable obscurity! One of
them, and our countryman, is singularly commended by Cardan,
for that "only one of his arguments was enough to puzzle all
posterity; and that, when he had grown old, he wept because he
could not understand his own books." Baker, in his Reflections
upon Learning, who had examined this schoolman, declares that
his obscurity is such, as if he never meant to be understood.
The extravagances of the schoolmen are, however, not always
those of Aristotle. Pope, and the wits of that day, like these
early members of the Royal Society, decried Aristotle, who did
not probably fall in the way of their studies. His great
imperfections are in natural philosophy; but he still
preserves his eminence for his noble treatises of Ethics, and
Politics, and Poetics, notwithstanding the imperfect state in
which these have reached us. Dr. Copleston and Dr. Gillies
have given an energetic testimony to their perpetual value.
Pope, in satirising the University as a nest of dunces,
considered the followers of Aristotle as so many stalled oxen,
"_fat bulls of Basan_."

"A hundred head of Aristotle's friends."
DUNCIAD.

Swift has drawn an allegorical personage of Aristotle, by
which he describes the nature of his works. "He stooped much,
and made use of a staff; his visage was meagre, his hair lank
and thin, and his voice hollow;" descriptive of his abrupt
conciseness, his harsh style, the obscurities of his
dilapidated text, and the deficiency o