They intuitively endow him with their own ideas, ways of looking at things, prejudices of sentiment, and so on, and receive something like a shock when later on they find out how different he is from this first hastily formed and largely performed image.
The same thing occurs in the reading of literature, and the appreciation of the arts of expression generally.

We usually approach an author with a predisposition to read our own habits of thought and sentiment into his words.

It is probably a characteristic defect of a good deal of current criticism of remote writers to attribute to them too much of our modern conceptions and aims.

Similarly, we often import our own special feelings into the utterances of the poet and of the musical composer.
That much of this intuition is illusory, may be seen by a little attention to the "intuitions" of different critics.

Two readers of unlike emotional organization will find incompatible modes of feeling in the same poet.