in skill and interest really to get at a good piece of literature in any language—even in his own language.
An acquaintance of mine had some years ago a confidential conversation with the public servant to whom had been committed, for a long period of years, the engrossing of the bills proposed by the successive ministries of one of the most powerful and intelligent nations on the face of the earth. This work this official had done for two prime ministers, one of whom was a classical scholar, the other a man of literary training and tastes, but without a liberal education in language study. The clear-cut, intelligible, interpretable character of the bills drafted by the former were, as a rule, in marked contrast with the confused, uninterpretable, but "flourishing" style of the latter.
As a rule, the Japanese cultivated classes acquire the speaking and writing of foreign languages with an uncommon speed and deftness. But I never knew a scholar of that nation—no matter, we will suppose, how well acquainted both with Japanese and with English—who could furnish you an exact interpretation of either one of these languages in terms of the other. This inability is doubtless partly due to the immense difference in the so-called genius of the two languages. But it is also, I venture to believe, largely due to the fact that exact interpretation—the telling precisely
