Título de la obra:
Introduction to the Literature of Europe, in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth centuries,
vol. 3
Pedantry and far-fetched allusions
Nothing can be more
opposite
to what is strictly called a classical style, or one formed upon the best models of Greece and Rome, than
pedantry.
This was nevertheless the
weed
that overspread the face of literature in those ages when Greece and Rome were the chief objects of
veneration.
Without an intimate discernment of their beauty it was easy to
copy
allusions that were no longer
intelligible,
to counterfeit trains of thought that belonged to past times, to
force
reluctant idioms into modern form, as some are said to dress after a lady for whom nature has done more than for themselves. From the revival of letters downwards this has been more or less observable in the learned men of
Europe,
and after that class grew more extensive, in the current literature of modern languages. Pedantry which consisted in unnecessary, and perhaps unintelligible, references to ancient learning, was afterwards combined with other artifices to obtain the same end,
far-fetched
metaphors and extravagant conceits. The
French
versifies of the latter end of the
sixteenth
century were eminent in both, as the works of
Ronsard
and Du Bartas attest. We might, indeed, take the Creation of Du Bartas more properly than the Euphues of our English Lilly, which though very affected and
unpleasing
does hardly such
violence
to common speech and common sense, for the type of the style which, in the early part of the
seventeenth
century, became popular in several countries, but especially in Spain, through the misplaced labours of
Gongora.