Page:The reflections of Lichtenberg.djvu/116

reading him. Yet it takes a great deal actually to understand Homer. A book that we fully grasp and understand when we are twenty, does not easily satisfy us at thirty. This is the cause of those pitiful imitations of the ancients which we get from young people. They imitate the Horace or the Shakespeare whom they recognize—of that I am perfectly certain, but not the Horace or the Shakespeare recognized by the man of experience, knowledge and insight. One adheres simply to the expression and the style, and fails even in this ; another presents us, almost in the same style, with passages resembling just those which we might wish had been omitted in the original; a third may indeed catch his author’s expression, yet having no knowledge or experience of the world tells us things that we already know by heart; and so on. It is a sure sign of a book being a good one that the older we get the more we enjoy it. A young man of eighteen who cared to say, might say and above all could say what he felt, would judge of Tacitus somewhat as follows :—“ Tacitus is a difficult author, good at characterization, and excellent at times in description, but he affects obscurity and often breaks into his narrative with observations which don't enlighten us very much. One must be well up in Latin to understand him.” At five-and-twenty, assuming that he has meanwhile been doing rather than reading a great deal, the young man’s judgment would perhaps run : —“ Tacitus is by no means the obscure writer that I took him to be; and I find that Latin is not the only thing one must know in order to understand