Mark Pattison, Diary of Casaubon:
“Those who suppose that to edit a classic is among the easiest of literary toils, and only a fit occupation for laborious dulness, can form no conception of what Casaubon accomplished. Those only who know that a perfectly good edition of a classic is among the rarest of triumphs which the literary Fasti have to record; that for the last three centuries we have been incessantly labouring at the Greek and Latin remains, and yet that the number which have been satisfactorily edited is fewer than some of the most popular of ancient authors who have been attempted the oftenest, as e.g. Horace, still awaits a competent expositor – those only can measure what a giant’s strength was required to cope with Athenaeus, in the state in which his remains existed in the time of Casaubon.”
