Laudator Temporis Acti

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 31.3 (1910) 358-369 (at 360):

Translation is, indeed, a hopeless task, but this very hopelessness is, in a sense, the measure of its usefulness as an initiation into the spirit of the author and of the language. No better way of introducing the novice to the curiosa felicitas of Horace than a close study of the Commentarius ad modum Minelli, the ordo of the Dauphin edition. Every change of a word is for the worse and the schoolboy learns why. In like manner, I am grateful to that fine scholar, Émile Egger, from whose Grammaire Comparée I learned sixty years ago the pedagogical value of the Paraphrase of the Iliad. And so it comes to pass that when I am forced to compare a translation, line by line, with the original, I go to school again and my heart is stirred to sympathy with the man who feels the original doubtless better than I do, though perhaps he is less meticulous.

See Émile Egger, Notions élémentaires de grammaire comparée pour servir à l'étude des trois langues classiques, 6e éd. (Paris: Auguste Durand, 1865), pp. 149-150, with n. 87 on pp. 205-206.