Education Quote by Joseph Addison

Order is Addison's real religion here, and he's using a backhanded compliment to enforce it. On the surface, he grants a rare exemption: only the truly learned or genuinely brilliant can get away with being messy. The trick is that the exemption doubles as a rebuke. Even genius, he implies, risks reading like a cluttered desk unless it submits to method. That little phrase "only supportable" gives away the moral posture: irregularity isn't an aesthetic choice; it's a tolerated flaw, pardoned the way society pardons the eccentricities of the powerful.

The metaphor does the heavy lifting. Pearls are value, refinement, and status; heaps are wasteful display. Addison frames undisciplined writing as a kind of aristocratic negligence: you can afford to toss riches around when you have too many to count. It's also a subtle jab at writers who perform abundance as depth - a familiar move in any era that mistakes volume for insight. "Too full to be exact" flatters the mind while indicting the craft. Exactness is labor, and labor is what the author should owe the reader.

Context matters. Addison helped build a public for periodical prose in The Spectator, a venue premised on clarity, civility, and the idea that good writing trains a rising middle-class readership. His target isn't just baroque stylists; it's the chaos that keeps culture gatekept. Method becomes democratic: string the pearls so others can wear them.