He was a frequent visitor at the Boston Athenaeum, and seized upon every
new book of value as soon as it appeared: was the first to read
translations of the Zendavesta and Confucius. He read almost every
readable book in the English language as well as translations from all
languages. He said he would as soon think of swimming across Charles
River when he might make use of a bridge as to read a foreign book in
the original if he could obtain a good translation.
This statement contains a good deal of truth, though it has been often
traversed by those who learn languages easily and think because they get
the literal meaning of Tacitus or Rousseau that they know all about the
matter. The full significance, however, of any good writer can only be
obtained by reflecting while we read, and the continuous exertion
required to decipher a foreign tongue interferes with this not a little.
If the reader can think in the language before him well and good, but
few are so fortunate; and of those few not more than one in ten will be
able to think in three or four different languages. Any person who has
merely a conversational knowledge of Italian, for instance, would do
much better to read the excellent translation we now have of Machiavelli
than to read the original; and no one except a Greek professor would
think of stumbling over Thucydides instead of using Jowett's version of
it.
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