Assuredly Horace never wrote for the boys who pass from public school to university, nor even for their masters; how could he, after having lived at one of the first Courts in the world. Everyone writes most easily for the class to which he belongs—I do not necessarily mean the class into which the world puts him. If we possessed specimens of what Horace wrote as a sixth-form boy, they might perhaps be quite comprehensible to other, or at least Roman, sixth-form boys.
Many of my readers will often have secretly confessed to themselves that the ancients are not so much to their taste as some of the moderns. I must acknowledge that this was my own case: I admired not a few before they gave me any pleasure; and conversely, not a few gave me pleasure before I understood them. I am convinced, too, that the same thing often happens to their commentators. Horace I admired long before he gave me any pleasure; and Milton and Virgil gave me pleasure before ever I understood them. When I had come to know the world better, when I had myself begun to observe human nature—not to write about it, but merely to keep my eyes open—and when in reading these authors I remembered my observations, I found that what I had previously cast aside in those poets as useless slag was just the ore itself. I thereupon made trial with other passages which had not corresponded with my own observations; they made me vigilant in the common round of life, and since that time my admiration for those great
