From William Hazlitt's essay *On the Ignorance of the Learned* (1821). Select the word that fits the blank. "You might as well ask the paralytic to leap from his chair and throw away his crutch, or, without a miracle, to 'take up his bed and walk,' as expect the learned reader to throw down his book and think for himself. He clings to it for his intellectual ______."

The simile is **paralytic + crutch** ↔ **learned reader + book**. The crutch *supports* the paralytic; the book must *support* the learned reader the same way. *Support* — the prop a disabled person leans on; figuratively, what someone depends on — fits the analogy. - *Embellishment* (decoration) reverses the function — a crutch isn't ornamental. - *Exercise* and *amusement* miss the *dependence* the simile invokes. Hazlitt's figure makes book-reliance pathological: the learned reader is intellectually disabled and the book is his crutch.