l is wide enough.

I do not mind confessing that for a long time past I have been very
sceptical about the classics. I was myself trained as a classical
scholar. It seemed the only thing to do with me. I acquired such a
singular facility in handling Latin and Greek that I could take a page
of either of them, distinguish which it was by merely glancing at it,
and, with the help of a dictionary and a pair of compasses, whip off a
translation of it in less than three hours.

But I never got any pleasure from it. I lied about it. At first,
perhaps, I lied through vanity. Any coloured scholar will understand the
feeling. Later on I lied through habit; later still because, after all,
the classics were all that I had and so I valued them. I have seen thus
a deceived dog value a pup with a broken leg, and a pauper child nurse a
dead doll with the sawdust out of it. So I nursed my dead Homer and my
broken Demosthenes though I knew in my heart that there was more sawdust
in the stomach of one modern author than in the whole lot of them.
Observe, I am not saying which it is that has it full of it.

So, as I say, I began to lie about the classics. I said to people who
knew no Greek that there was a sublimity, a majesty about Homer which
they could never hope to grasp. I said it was like the sound of the sea
beating against the granite cliffs of the Ionian Esophagus: or words to
that effect. As for the truth of it, I might as well have said that it
was like the sound of a rum distillery running a night shift on half
time. At any rate this is what I said about Homer, and when I spoke of
Pindar,--the dainty grace of his strophes,--and Aristophanes, the
delicious sallies of his wit, sally after sally, each sally explained
in a note calling it a sally--I managed to suffuse my face with an
animation which made it almost beautiful.

I admitted of course that Virgil in spite of his genius had a hardness
and a cold glitter which resembled rather the brilliance of a cut
diamond than the soft grace of a flower. Certainly I admitted this: the
mere admission of it would knock the breath out of anyone who was
arguing.

From such talks my friends went away sad. The conclusion was too cruel.
It had all the cold logic of a syllogism (like that almost brutal form
of argument so much admired in the Paraphernalia of Socrates). For if:--

Virgil and Homer and Pindar had all this grace, and pith and
these sallies,--
And if I read Virgil a