lighter condition regulating the rewards of heroic and humane deeds, the punishment of wickedness and sin?"[139] He was an "aristocrat of learning,"--only the wise should have the government of the world; the people were unfit to judge either of truth or of men. [Sidenote: Pedantry.] Along with this distrust of the vulgar went a far more intense dislike of the kind of learning they admired, and of the type of scholar, the pedant, that most appealed to them. The minds of the vulgar, it seemed to him, were more readily turned by sophisms, by the appearances on the surface of things, than by the truth that is hidden in their substance, and is indeed their substance itself;[140] and the man--too frequent in the Italian, and generally in the learned world of those days--most apt to veil a real ignorance by a pretended knowledge, by a show of externals, by appeal to authorities with whom he had himself no acquaintance, was _the pedant_. Bruno himself was not without that touch of vanity which led him, like others, to mass together quotations and phrases from Latin and even from Greek writers; to point an argument by forced analogies from classical mythology; to heap up references, in support of his theories, to the Neoplatonists, to the mystics, to the Cabbalah, to the older Greek philosophers: these adornments were quite in the fashion of his time, and looked at in that light they add to, rather than detract from, the peculiar charm and spirit of his writings. The true pedant--such as Polihimnio in the _Causa_ (who has been thought to have suggested Polonius in _Hamlet_), Mamphurio in the _Candelaio_, Prudentio in the _Cena_--is one that for style loves long words, learned phrases, irrespective of their context; who, under pretence of accuracy, delights in trifling, subtle distinctions, sows broadcast mythological or classical allusions without a hint of relevancy. His favourite hunting-ground is, however, philosophy, and it is to philosophy, according to Bruno, that the pedant has done greatest injury. One of the most vigorous descriptions of him which Bruno gives is in the _Causa_,[141] where, no doubt, some of the actual writers of the time are satirised. Curiously, Ramus and Patrizzi, both reformers of philosophy, are mentioned as "arch-pedants"; but men have always criticised most bitterly those who stood nearest to themselves. Bruno regarded words as the servants of his pen, claimed, and indeed exercised almost too freely, the right of inventing new words for new things. Use and wont, he knew, determined the fate of words as of other things; some which had fallen into decay would rise again, others now honoured would lapse from use. For the teaching of the philosophers of old their own old words were the clearest mirror, but for new theories new words might be sought from the readiest source:--"grammarians are the servants of words, words are our servants; it is for them to study the use to which we put our words."[142] XX