Cavilling meaning

The most foolish and discreditable was certainly that of Davies; his unworthy attempt to depreciate the great historian's learning, and his captious, cavilling, acrimonious charges of petty inaccuracies and discreditable falsification gave the object of his attack an easy triumph.

In the Musenalmanach were also published the "Xenien" (1797), a collection of distichs by Goethe and Schiller, in which the two friends avenged themselves on the cavilling critics who were not in sympathy with them.