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Aristotle stooped much, and made use of a staff. His visage was

meagre, his hair lank and thin, and his voice hollow. I soon

discovered that both of them were perfect strangers to the rest

of the company, and had never seen or heard of them before. And I

had a whisper from a ghost, who shall be nameless, "That these

commentators always kept in the most distant quarters from their

principals, in the lower world, through a consciousness of shame

and guilt, because they had so horribly misrepresented the

meaning of these authors to posterity." I introduced Didymus and

Eustathius to Homer, and prevailed on him to treat them better

than perhaps they deserved, for he soon found they wanted a

genius to enter into the spirit of a poet. But Aristotle was out

of all patience with the account I gave him of Scotus and Ramus,

as I presented them to him; and he asked them "whether the rest

of the tribe were as great dunces as themselves?"').