Is one that would make all others more fools than himself, for though he
knew nothing, he would not have the world know so much. He conceits
nothing in learning but the opinion, which he seeks to purchase without
it, though he might with less labour cure his ignorance than hide it. He
is indeed a kind of scholar-mountebank, and his art our delusion. He is
tricked out in all the accoutrements of learning, and at the first
encounter none passes better. He is oftener in his study than at his
book, and you cannot pleasure him better than to deprehend him: yet he
hears you not till the third knock, and then comes out very angry as
interrupted. You find him in his _slippers_[71] and a pen in his ear, in
which formality he was asleep. His table is spread wide with some
classick folio, which is as constant to it as the carpet, and hath laid
open in the same page this half year. His candle is always a longer
sitter up than himself, and the _boast_[72] of his window at midnight.
He walks much alone in the posture of meditation, and has a book still
before his face in the fields. His pocket is seldom without a Greek
testament or Hebrew Bible, which he opens only in the church, and that
when some stander-by looks over. He has sentences for company, some
scatterings of Seneca and Tacitus, which are good upon all occasions. If
he reads any thing in the morning, it comes up all at dinner; and as
long as that lasts, the discourse is his. He is a great plagiary of
tavern wit, and comes to sermons only that he may talk of Austin. His
parcels are the mere scrapings from company, yet he complains at parting
what time he has lost. He is wondrously capricious to seem a judgment,
and listens with a sour attention to what he understands not. He talks
much of Scaliger, and Casaubon, and the Jesuits, and prefers some
unheard of Dutch name before them all. He has verses to bring in upon
these and these hints, and it shall go hard but he will wind in his
opportunity. He is critical in a language he cannot construe, and speaks
seldom under Arminius in divinity. His business and retirement and
caller away is his study, and he protests no delight to it comparable.
He is a great nomenclator of authors, which he has read in general in
the catalogue, and in particular in the title, and goes seldom so far as
the dedication. He never talks of anything but learning, and learns all
from talking. Three encounters with the same men pump him, and then he
only puts in or gravely says nothing. He has taken pains to be an ass,
though not to be a scholar, and is at length discovered and laughed at.