56 ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 



Here, therefore, is the first distemper of learning, when 

 men study words and not matter; and though we have 

 given an example of it from later times, yet such levities 

 have and will be found more or less in all ages. And this 

 must needs discredit learning, even with vulgar capacities, 

 when they see learned men s works appear like the first 

 letter of a patent, which, though finely flourished, is still 

 but a letter. Pygmalion s frenzy seems a good emblem of 

 this vanity; 62 for words are but the images of matter, and 

 unless they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love 

 with them is to fall in love with a picture. 



Yet the illustrating the obscurities of philosophy with 

 sensible and plausible elocution is not hastily to be con 

 demned; for hereof we have eminent examples in Xeno- 

 phon, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and Plato; 63 and the thing 

 itself is of great use; for although it be some hindrance to 

 the severe inquiry after truth, and the further progress 

 in philosophy, that it should too early prove satisfactory 

 to the mind, and quench the desire of further search, be 

 fore a just period is made; yet when we have occasion for 

 learning and knowledge in civil life, as for conference, 

 counsel, persuasion, discourse, or the like, we find it ready 

 prepared to our hands in the authors who have wrote in 

 this way. But the excess herein is so justly contemptible, 

 that as Hercules, when he saw the statue of Adonis, who 

 was the delight of Yenus, in the temple, said with indigna 

 tion, &quot;There is no divinity in thee&quot; ; so all the followers 

 of Hercules in learning, that is, the more severe and labori 

 ous inquirers after truth, will despise these delicacies and 

 affectations as trivial and effeminate. 



The luxuriant style was succeeded by another, which, 

 though more chaste, has still its vanity, as turning wholly 

 upon pointed expressions and short periods, so as to appear 



52 Ovid, Metam. x. 243. 



53 M. Fontenelle is an eminent modern instance in the same way, who, par 

 ticularly in his &quot;Plurality of &quot;Worlds,&quot; renders the present system of astron 

 omy agreeably familiar, as his &quot;History of the Royal Academy&quot; embellishes 

 and explains the abstruse parts of mathematics and natural philosophy. Shaw. 



