When I was in Rome last summer whom should I meet but Horace.
I did not know him at first, and told him enquiringly that the
post-office was in the Piazza Venezia?
He smiled benignly, shrugged his shoulders, said “Prego” and pointed to
the post-office itself, which was over the way and, of course, in the
Piazza S. Silvestro.
Then I knew him. I believe he went straight home and wrote an epistle to
Mecænas, or whatever the man’s name was, asking how it comes about that
people who travel hundreds of miles to see things can never see what is
all the time under their noses. In fact, I saw him take out his
note-book and begin making notes at once. He need not talk. He was not
a good man of business and I do not believe his books sold much better
than my own. But this does not matter to him now, for he has not the
faintest idea that he ever wrote any of them and, more likely than not,
has never even refreshed his memory by reading them.