A.E. Housman, Throwing Some Editorial Shade

I remember, when researching A. E. Housman for my prelims (concentrating on his poetry, obviously, from A Shropshire Lad), coming across this quote from wikipedia:

Many colleagues were unnerved by his scathing attacks on those he thought guilty of shoddy scholarship. ... He declared many of his contemporary scholars to be stupid, lazy, vain, or all three, saying: "Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders, and brains, not pudding, in your head."

Well, by happenstance, I'm looking at his introduction to Manlius's Astronomicon, and the guy really doesn't let up.

This [1579 edition of Manlius] is his [Scalinger's] greatest work; and its virtues, if they had fewer vices to keep them company, are such that it is almost importunate to praise them. True, there is luck as well as merit in the achievement: many of his emendations required no Scaliger to make them, and were made by Scaliger only because Manilius hitherto instead of finding a Beroaldus or Marullus to befriend him, had fallen, as he was destined often to fall again, into the hands of dullards. To write tum di for timidi in 1 422 was a feat of easy brilliancy, and such corrections are less of an honour to Scaliger than a shame to his predecessors; but after all deductions there remains enough to make a dozen editors illustrious. The commentary ... is the only avenue to a study of the poem. He seems to have read everything, Greek and Latin, published and unpublished, which could explain or illustrate his author; and his vast learning is carried lightly and imparted simply in terse notes of moderate compass. Discursive he often is, and sometimes vagrant, but even in digressions be neither fatigues his readers like Casaubon nor bewilders them like Salmasius. His style has not the ease and grace and Latinity of Lambinus', but no commentary is brisker reading or better entertainment than these abrupt and pithy notes, with their spurts of mockery at unnamed detractors, and their frequent and significant stress upon the difference between Scaliger and a jackass.

Scalinger, apparently, is just as acerbic as Housman himself, and Housman likes to be scathing to bad editors. He's entire introduction, too, is surprisingly allusive, as this excerpt shows. I caught the reference to Casaubon (Middlemarch), but the others quite flew over my head.