Page:The Art of Literature - Schopenhauer - 1897.djvu/63

 are writers in every nation in Europe, who afford examples of this vulgar feeling. It is this which led Yriate to caricature them in the thirty-third of his charming Literary Fables.

In learning a language, the chief difficulty consists in making acquaintance with every idea which it expresses, even though it should use words for which there in no exact equivalent in the mother tongue; and this often happens. In learning a new language a man has, as it were, to mark out in his mind the boundaries of quite new spheres of ideas, with the result that spheres of ideas arise where none were before. Thus he not only learns words, he gains ideas too.

This is nowhere so much the case as in learning ancient languages, for the differences they present in their