Template:Dsh a lot of learning

Queen: Hark: a clammy ditch. How deep!

Nuncle: And yet with our temper’d syllogies
We dig it deeper by the minute.

Queen: And behold: fair Triago —

Nuncle: Of open’d mouth and mind,
Well-endowed to drop right in it.

Enter Triago popping his head out of the ditch muttering to himself

Triago: Who wouldst die, wouldst die therein about it?

Queen: How now, Triago?
How fares thy latest batty postulation?

Triago: Most promising, Majesty.
I have it ratified that wren’s eggs,
Broken thus, betray yet unacknowledged villainy.

Queen: How so, Professor?

Triago: Experimental rigour, Ma’am. Nothing less:
A hundred men, detained at your pleasure, were took
And each one bid to strike an egg against a pan.
Every wren’s egg broke. The lot. Not one exception!

Nuncle: Pray, give me air!

Queen: What provenance the eggs?

Triago: I bid each man poach one from the mother’s nest:
Insurance that their hearts were indubitably black.

Queen: Poor Mrs. Wren must be furious!

Nuncle: Not quite so wild as is this correlation spurious.

Triago: Ho, Ho.
Let not thy witty fool, nor his foolish wit
Besmirch the fruited science of th’ academy.
“A little learning is a dangerous thing” —

Nuncle: Yet not half so dangerous as a lot.

Triago: — So sayeth Pope, you know.

Nuncle: But not the one in Rome:

Queen: Good ser knight: art thou drunk upon the Pierian spring:
A hypoxic draft that suffocates the brain,
So deep no shaft of light can bring it round again?

Triago: My conjecture comports a grain of truth
As pure and true and golden—

Nuncle: — but yet no more roundly causative
Than are the month-past flappings of a Latin papillon
Upon a brewing Filipino typhoon.

Triago: {{{2}}}

(aside): Yet am I here caught, a spider’s prey

Wrestling ’gainst the sticky silk
And by mine own dim efforts
Binding e’er further to my criminous fate.
In this sinking oubliette of mine devise

Am I enchain’d: alack! There is no gate.

Queen: Is it our plight? So to suffer fools?
Should Cipolla’s curse beset me round with pains?

Nuncle: He who suffers most sees least
But suffers not so much from fools as brains.

Herculio: is this the abyss you wouldst die in?
Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts;
While from the bounded level of our mind
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind
But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise
New distant scenes of endless science rise!
So pleased at first the towering Alps we try,
Mount o’er the vales, and seem to tread the sky;
The eternal snows appear already past,
And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;
But those attained, we tremble to survey
The growing labours of the lengthened way;
The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,
Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!