And
so, indeed, it happened with these quarrelsome Alexandrian grammarians,
as it did with the Casaubons and Scaligers and Daciers of the last two
centuries. As soon as they began quarrelling they lost the power of
discovering. The want of the inductive faculty in their attempts at
philology is utterly ludicrous. Most of their derivations of words are
about on a par with Jacob Bohmen's etymology of sulphur, wherein he
makes sul, if I recollect right, signify some active principle of
combustion, and phur the passive one. It was left for more patient and
less noisy men, like Grimm, Bopp, and Buttmann, to found a science of
philology, to discover for us those great laws which connect modern
philology with history, ethnology, physiology, and with the very deepest
questions of theology itself. And in the meanwhile, these Alexandrians'
worthless criticism has been utterly swept away; while their real work,
their accurate editions of the classics, remain to us as a precious
heritage. So it is throughout history: nothing dies which is worthy to
live. The wheat is surely gathered into the garner, the chaff is burnt
up by that eternal fire which, happily for this universe, cannot be
quenched by any art of man, but goes on forever, devouring without
indulgence all the folly and the falsehood of the world.
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