In his _Calandra_, Bibbiena gives an example of one who is completely uninteresting, speaking, acting, and dressing like the rest of men. But these young fellows were men, and what is more, men of education, not so foolish as, after tasting of a life of refinement, to fail long to recognise its advantages. Sometimes, under a guileless demeanour, they suffered temptations the reverse of philosophic: Vegio[67] calls them, without mincing matters, “abominable bucks.” They learnt by experience how hard it is to get on by zeal and earnestness, and how easy by other means. They cultivated literature to some purpose. No one thought any the worse of Antony de la Salle, the austere tutor of the house of Anjou in the 15th century, for writing _The Fifteen Joys of Marriage_ or _The Hundred Novels_, or of Lemaire’s[68] notion of elevating the ideas of the young Charles V. by offering him delicate nourishment in the shape of a _Judgment of Paris_ of photographic realism—a picture of the future reserved by heaven for princes and the great ones of the earth. Such things were read: dissertations on Aristotle were not. In proportion as the women posed as patrons of literature, the tutor type appears in higher relief. The torrent of invective let loose against them leaves no room for doubt that the tutors had red-letter days. The dramatists and the writers of novels do not condone the airs of proprietorship they assumed in regard to mothers or cousins. They show you a poor devil of a pedagogue, a dried-up anatomy, void of personal merit, ill-featured, grotesque, boorish, dying for love of some fair, rich and distinguished girl, whom he pesters with glowing love-letters, or with sonnets spiced with epicureanism. What peals of laughter there are when he, like many others, comes in due course to taste the rod in pickle! From the moment when Aretino, in his _Marescalco_, which appeared in 1533, revealed the dramatic possibilities of such a part, the type was fixed. Before the tutor appears on the scene you know what you are going to see: a spectacled pedant, ungainly, loutish, pretentious, a twaddling bore, full of philology and quotations. His very features have acquired a mechanical cast betraying his habit of holding forth on the obvious, as Montaigne says, or of extinguishing youth by his stupidity, his “hoggish wisdom,” to adopt the words of Rabelais. Then, in virtue of a law of fate, the glory of the tutor waned and fell. The impulse that went forth towards liberal studies brought so many rivals into the field that, unless he opened a private seminary or obtained a professorial chair, the tutor was ruined. His salary became diminutive, and, as we know, the man who is poorly paid is thought little of. He may take all the pains imaginable, set impositions, rap knuckles, pull ears, but no one is satisfied. “I know no worse blockhead in the world than the scholar, except it be the pedant.”