There is an impression abroad that Mr. Lewes, if anything, did some injury to George Eliot from a literary point of view; that the nature of his pursuits led her to adopt too technical and pedantic a phraseology in her novels.
"George Eliot"
Mathilde Blind
The hatred of the pedantic is the characteristic sentiment of the time.
"English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century"
Leslie Stephen
Imagine every novel, poem, and essay written during the last two centuries to be obliterated and further, the literature of the early seventeenth century and all that went before to be regarded as pedantic and obsolete, the field of study would be so limited that a man would be forced in spite of himself to read his Homer and Virgil.
"English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century"
Leslie Stephen