The Eighteenth Century

It was the age when first appears that well-known character of the academic world, the scholar whose spider-ridden house is so piled with books that he cannot go to bed and has to sleep in an arm-chair: the little, personal, disorganized sign of the disinterested passion for truth about the past. It was the ago when first appears, as a type, the 'pedant', and when appeared also the first delicate satires upon pedantry. It was the age when the social status of the pure scholar had risen to heights hardly known since the days of Erasmus--...when the Guide-Book to Paris mentions a number of savants among the important and interesting sights of that city.

—Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman (1957)