Template:Dsh a lot of learning
Triago: “A little learning is a dangerous thing” —
Nuncle: Not half so dangerous as a lot.
Triago: So sayeth Pope, you know.
Nuncle: But not the one in Rome.
Thou art drunk on waters of the Pierian spring:
An hypoxic draft that suffocates the brain,
So deep no shaft of light can bring thee round again.
Triago: Mine own conjecture comports a grain of truth
As pure and true and golden—
Nuncle: And yet no more roundly causative
Than the month-past flappings of a Latin papillon
Of a brewing Filipino typhoon.
Triago: 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: How now Triago.
How fares thy latest batty postulation?
Triago: Most promising, Majesty.
I have it upon good science that wren’s eggs,
Broken thus, may uncover villainy in the hearts of those around.
Queen: How so, professor?
Triago: Experimental rigour, ma’am. Nothing less:
A hundred men, detained at your pleasure
And bid each one strike an egg against a pan.
Each wren’s egg broke. Not one exception!
Nuncle: Pray, give me air!
Queen: What provenance the eggs?
Triago: I bid that each man poached 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:
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.
Queen: Hark: a clammy well. Its temper’d syllogies grow deeper by the minute.
And behold: fair Triago —
Nuncle: Of open mouth and mind, well endowed to drop right in it.
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!</noinclude?