Thus they had never read Shakespeare even in the original.
Once, long ago in Coalchester, a hundred years ago, there had been a little circle of elegant literati, connoisseurs of literature and art,--men, so far as men of that age might be, genuinely, if timidly and old-maidishly, affectionate towards belles-lettres; men who had got so far as to appreciate the freshness of an Elizabethan song; minor Bishops Percy; and such lavender is the true love of anything that their memories still hung about the walls of the old Lyceum along with their portraits; while so necessary are great names for little towns to boast of, that the compiler of the local gazetteer implied that Coalchester glowed at night with quite a lustre from their names.

Besides, they proved very useful in damping young men.

And yet you wouldn't know their names if I were to write them--as I would rather like to do.
The learned Dr.Sibley, he wrote a pleasant little essay on "Taste," you know, with a few additional notes on chiaroscuro; and then there was the learned Dr.Ambrose, who wrote quite a pretty little treatise on Song-writing.
No! Of course you won't know any of them.

Yet they were all once, and are still, "The Learned." You'll never hear Theophilus Londonderry spoken of as that, I'm afraid.
As it is the property of fame to grow with time, and the way of a great name to begin with brains and end with lords, a great man's descendants are not unnaturally found persons of much greater consequence than the original great one.

In like manner the dignity and importance of the members of the Literary and Philosophical Society had grown, in direct ratio to their distance from the original founders of it; and the learned Doctors Sibley and Ambrose, who really did know something about art and poetry and certainly loved them, can never have been persons of such consequence as one or two of their descendants who are nameless, and who certainly knew nothing about either.
One of the real objects of this sad little Society was passionately to ignore what they contemptuously called local talent.