Word: prig
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Dates: during 1890-1899
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...used to better society and have the air of the great world, of the world, that is, which makes fashions and is not made by them. They opened their Homer, their Sophocles, their Tacitus, their Horace, where we take up our newspaper or our novel. What an old Gascon prig would Montaigne have been but for the ancients, especially Plutarch. Yet his library did not swamp him, and though his essays are pockmarked all over with quotations, his temper is essentially modern, indeed, he is the first of the properly modern writers. It is not as ladders to the languages...