But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.
Nor ought a genius less than his that writ attempt translation.
Ben Rome was a perfectionist. He checked every letter that went out to make sure the English was correct.
However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.
It is a curious fact that the word 'essayist' showed up in English before it existed in French.
Listen, here's the thing about an English degree - if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English.
Those of us who write spend our entire lives in an endless English class.
In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.
In England only uneducated people show off their knowledge; nobody quotes Latin or Greek authors in the course of conversation, unless he has never read them.