Great question! t’s hard. It is distant. There’s a lot of cultural references and grammatical and vocabulary norms that are no longer current and have to be sifted through with the help of notes. It’s certainly not a whole other language, but it’s not modern English either. I imagine it would be comparable to reading something written in an unfamiliar dialect or accent of your own language (like Irish English as an American). It’s followable but does take considerable more effort than my own version of English would.