Here it takes the form of comedy and broad farce. There is a touch of 'tart Aristophanes' in the representation here. This is the introductory performance of the school in which the student hopes for _high words howsoever low the matter_, emphasizing that hope with an allusion to the heights of learning, as he finds it, and the highest word of it, which seems irreverent, until we find from the whole purport of the play how far _he_ at least is from taking it _in vain_, whatever implication of that sort his criticism may be intended to leave on others, who use good words with so much iteration and to so little purpose. 'That is a _high hope_ for a low having' is the rejoinder of that associate of his, whose views on this point agree with his own so entirely. It is the height of the _hope_ and the lowness of the _having_--it is the height of the _words_ and the lowness of the _matter_, that makes the incongruity here. That is the soul of all the mirth that is stirring here. It is the height of '_the style_' that '_gives us cause to climb in the merriment_' that makes the subject of this essay. It is literature in general that is laughed at here, and the branches of it in particular. It is the old books that are walking about under these trees, with their follies all ravelled out, making sport for us.
But this is not all. It is the _defect_ in learning which is represented here--that same 'defect' which a graver work of this Academy reports, in connection with a proposition for the Advancement of Learning--for its advancement into the fields not yet taken up, and which turn out, upon inquiry, to be the fields of human life and practice;--it is that main defect which is represented here. 'I find a kind of science of "_words_" but none of "_things_,"' says the reporter. 'What do you read, my lord?' 'Words, words, words,' echoes the Prince of Denmark. 'I find in these antique books, in these Philosophies and Poems, a certain resplendent or lustrous mass of matter chosen to give glory either to the subtilty of disputations, or to the eloquence of discourses,' says the other and graver reporter; 'but as to the ordinary and common matter of which life consisteth, I do _not_ find it erected into an art or science, or reduced to written inquiry.' 'How _low_ soever the matter, I hope in God for _high words_,' says a speaker, who comes out of that same palace of learning on to this stage with the secret badge of the new lore on him, which is the lore of practice--a speaker not less grave, though he comes in now in the garb of this pantomime, to make sport for us with his news of learning. For 'Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light for the law of writ and the liberty.'