We certainly did very well in Greek and Latin, and read a number of classical texts, not only critically at school, but also cursorily at home, having to give a weekly account of what we had thus read by ourselves. I liked my classics, and yet I could not help feeling that there was a certain exaggeration in the way in which every one of them was spoken of by our teachers, nay, that as compared to German poets and prose writers they were somewhat overpraised. Still, it would have been very conceited not to admire what our masters admired, and as in duty bound we went into the usual raptures about Homer and Sophocles, about Horace and Cicero. Many things which in later life we learn to admire in the classics could hardly appeal to the taste of boys. The directness, the simplicity and originality of the ancient, as compared with modern writers, cannot be appreciated by them, and I well remember being struck with what we disrespectful boys called the cheekiness of Horace expecting immortality (_non omnis moriar_) for little poems which we were told were chiefly written after Greek patterns. We had to admit that there were fewer false quantities in his Latin verses than in our own, but in other respects we could not see that his odes were so infinitely superior to ours. His hope of immortality has certainly been fulfilled beyond what could have been his own expectations. With so little of ancient history known to him, his idea of the immortality of poetry must have been far more modest in his time than in our own. He may have known the past glories of the Persian Empire, but as to ancient literature, there was nothing for him to know, whether in Persia, in Babylonia, in Assyria, or even in Egypt, least of all in India. Literary fame existed for him in Greece only, and in the Roman Empire, and his own ambition could therefore hardly have extended beyond these limits. The exaggeration in the panegyrics passed on everything Greek or Latin dates from the classical scholars of the Middle Ages, who knew nothing that could be compared to the classics, and who were loud in praising what they possessed the monopoly of selling. Successive generations of scholars followed suit, so that even in our time it seemed high treason to compare Goethe with Horace, or Schiller with Sophocles. Of late, however, the danger is rather that the reaction should go too far and lead to a promiscuous depreciation even of such real giants as Lucretius or Plato. The fact is that we have learnt from them and imitated them, till in some cases the imitations have equalled or even excelled the originals, while now the taste for classical correctness has been wellnigh supplanted by an appetite for what is called realistic, original, and extravagant.