Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning.

In these lines Goldsmith sets convivial experience against formal schooling, mocking “grammar” and bookish “learning” as pedantic puzzles compared with the enlivening effects of “good liquor.” The speaker’s claim that drink “gives genius a better discerning” is best read as comic exaggeration in the tradition of tavern-song and satiric verse: wit and inspiration are imagined as social, bodily, and spontaneous rather than produced by rules. The couplet also plays on an 18th‑century tension between polite education and the culture of clubs, coffeehouses, and drinking societies, where conversation and improvisatory wit were prized as marks of talent.