The Learned English Dog

[Dave Monroe]

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 11:55 PM, Albert Rolls <alprolls at earthlink.net> wrote:

> I've officially become fascinated: "'The Learned English Dog': Fielding's Mock Scholarship," by Bertrand A. Goldgar in Augustan Subjects, ed. AJ Rivero (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997).

Thanks!  For these and the Langford.  They both evaded somehow,though
it's been a while now.  See, e.g., ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=60179

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=60221

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0601&msg=99603

> There's actually scholarship on the 18th century Learned dog, Boswell mentions him in The Life of SJ. The dog isn't simply "another of Pynchon's antirationalist inventions" (Timothy Parrish, From Civil War to the Apocalypse (2008).

Also ...

"'Peace, Grandam,-- reclaim thy Ort.  The Learned One has yet to sink
quite that low.'" (M&D, Ch. 3, p. 26)

Cf.  ...
...
"I told him that I had dined lately at [Samuel] Foote's.  'Pray, Sir,
is not Foote an infidel?' JOHNSON. 'I do not know, Sir, that the
fellow is an infidel; but if he be an infidel, he is an infidel as a
dog is an infidel; that is to say, he has never thought upon the
subject.'  BOSWELL. 'I suppose, Sir, he has thought superficially, and
seized the first notions which occured to his mind.'  JOHNSON. 'hy
then, Sir, still he is like a dog, that snatches the piece next him.
Did you never observe that dogs have not the power of comparing?  A
dog will take a small bit of meat as readily as a large, when both are
before him.'" (pp. 146-7)

--James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (New York: Penguin, 1979
[1791]), "Part IV: 1764-70," pp. 123-54

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109

Further ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=60222

... and, esp., ....

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=60297

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0110&msg=60353