Thus it came to pass
that many times an adherent of the old learning would seek to
strengthen his position by an appeal to its famous doctor, familiarly
called Duns; while those of the new learning would contemptuously
rejoin, 'Oh, you are a _Dunsman_' or more briefly, 'You are a _Duns_,'
--or, 'This is a piece of _duncery_'; and inasmuch as the new learning
was ever enlisting more and more of the genius and scholarship of the
age on its side, the title became more and more a term of scorn.
'Remember ye not,' says Tyndal, 'how within this thirty years and far
less, the old barking curs, _Dunce's_ disciples, and like draff called
Scotists, the children of darkness, raged in every pulpit against Greek,
Latin, and Hebrew?' And thus from that conflict long ago extinct
between the old and the new learning, that strife between the medieval
and the modern theology, we inherit 'dunce' and 'duncery.' The lot of
Duns, it must be confessed, has been a hard one, who, whatever his
merits as a teacher of Christian truth, was assuredly one of the
keenest and most subtle-witted of men. He, the 'subtle Doctor' by pre-
eminence, for so his admirers called him, 'the wittiest of the school-
divines,' as Hooker does not scruple to style him, could scarcely have
anticipated, and did not at all deserve, that his name should be turned
into a by-word for invincible stupidity.
This is but one example of the singular fortune waiting upon words. We
have another of a parallel injustice, in the use which 'mammetry,' a
contraction of 'Mahometry,' obtained in our early English.
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