Then did Sturmius
spend such infinite and curious pains upon Cicero the Orator and
Hermogenes the Rhetorician, besides his own books of Periods and
Imitation, and the like. Then did Car of Cambridge and Ascham with
their lectures and writings almost deify Cicero and Demosthenes, and
allure all young men that were studious unto that delicate and
polished kind of learning. Then did Erasmus take occasion to make
the scoffing echo, Decem annos consuumpsi in legendo Cicerone; and
the echo answered in Greek, One, Asine. Then grew the learning of
the schoolmen to be utterly despised as barbarous. In sum, the
whole inclination and bent of those times was rather towards copy
than weight.
(3) Here therefore [is] the first distemper of learning, when men
study words and not matter; whereof, though I have represented an
example of late times, yet it hath been and will be secundum majus
et minus in all time. And how is it possible but this should have
an operation to discredit learning, even with vulgar capacities,
when they see learned men's works like the first letter of a patent
or limited book, which though it hath large flourishes, yet it is
but a letter? It seems to me that Pygmalion's frenzy is a good
emblem or portraiture of this vanity; for words are but the images
of matter, and except they have life of reason and invention, to
fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.
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