The Reliques of Father Prout

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1866 Excerpt: ...have given his opinions on the merit of the leading French philosophers--a gang of theorists now happily swept off the face of the earth, or most miserably supplanted in France by St. Simonians and Doctrinaires, and in this country by the duller and more plodding generation of Utilitarians. To Denis Diderot has succeeded Dionysius Lardner, both toiling interminable at their cyclopaedias, and, like wounded snakes, though trampled on. by all who tread the paths of science, still rampant onwards in the dust and slime of elaborate authorship. Truly, since the days of the great St. Denis, who walked deliberately, with imperturbable composure, bearing his head in his astonished grasp, from Montraartre to the fifth milestone on the northern road out of Paris; nay, since the still earlier epoch of the Sicilian schoolmaster, who opened a university at Corinth, omitting Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Dennis the critic who figures in the Dunciad, never has the name been borne with greater Mat than by its great modern proprietor. His theories, and those of Dr. Bowring, are glanced at in the following paper, which concludes the Proutean series of the Songs of France. Far be it from us to imagine that either of these learned doctors will turn from their crude speculations and listen to the voice of the charmer, charm he ever so wisely; we know the self-opinionated tribe too well to fancy such a consummation as the result of old Prout's strictures: but, since the late downfal of Wbiggery, we can afford to laugh at what must now only appear in the harmless shape of a solemn quiz. We would no more quarrel with them for hugging their cherished doctrines, than we would find fault with the Hussites above mentioned; who, when t...