John Addington Symonds, Memoirs:
“To steady my brains in this hectic fever, and to distract my thoughts from unwholesome poetry-making, I now began, at Jowett’s request, to translate Zeller’s volumes upon Aristotle. (In the Geschichte der Griechischen Philosophie.) The task was extremely uncongenial and irksome. I worked at it with difficulty, and failed to produce anything worth looking at. Meanwhile the close attention I had to pay to small German and Greek type, and the constant recurrence to dictionaries, brought the chronic inflammation of my eyes again into an acute stage. I went doggedly on at intervals, until I had finished the whole text – not the notes – and then I flung the ms. aside for ever.”
