school-divine

Can I think you have any esteem for a writer who has spoiled Tasso's hell and the devil; who transforms Lucifer, sometimes into a toad, and at others into a pygmy; who makes him say the same thing over again a hundred times; who metamorphoses him into a school-divine; and who, by an absurdly serious imitation of Ariosto's comic invention of fire-arms, represents the devils and angels cannonading each other in heaven!

Classic French Course in English William Cleaver Wilkinson

Hell and the Devil; who transforms Lucifer sometimes into a toad, and at others into a pygmy; who makes him say the same thing over again a hundred times; who metamorphoses him into a school-divine; and who, by an absurdly serious imitation of Ariosto's comic invention of firearms, represents the devils and angels cannonading each other in Heaven?

Candide 1918

Even Pope was shocked at the notion of Providence talking like a “school-divine.

John Milton (1859) 1909

Deity is carefully withheld from sight, which is more than can be said for the Laureate, who hath thought proper to make him talk, not "like a school-divine," [497] but like the unscholarlike Mr. Southey.

The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 4 George Gordon Byron Byron 1806

I am ready to give up the dialogues in Heaven, where, as Pope justly observes, "God the Father turns a school-divine"; nor do I consider the battle of the angels as the climax of sublimity, or the most successful effort of Milton's pen.

Lectures on the English Poets Delivered at the Surrey Institution William Hazlitt 1804

Can I think you have any esteem for a writer who has spoiled Tasso’s hell and the devil; who transforms Lucifer sometimes into a toad, and at others into a pygmy; who makes him say the same thing over again a hundred times; who metamorphoses him into a school-divine; and who, by an absurdly serious imitation of Ariosto’s comic invention of firearms, represents the devils and angels cannonading each other in heaven?

Candide 2007