Reading is the most rational employment, if people seek food for the understanding, and do not read merely to remember words; or with a view to quote celebrated authors, and retail sentiments they do not understand or feel. Judicious books enlarge the mind and improve the heart, though some, by them, "are made coxcombs whom nature meant for fools."
Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, p. 49. The coxcombs remark is an allusion to Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism":
Yet, if we look more closely, we shall find
Most have the seeds of judgment in their mind:
Nature affords at least a glimm'ring light,
The lines, though touched but faintly, are drawn right;
But as the slightest sketch, if justly traced,
Is by ill-colouring but the more disgraced,
So by false learning is good sense defaced:
Some are bewildered in the maze of schools,
And some made coxcombs nature meant but fools.
That is, learning can make people with a little sense but nothing more even worse, by making them people with less than that little sense who give themselves airs of elegance and wit.
