In the first volume epic, lyric and dramatic poetry are dealt with in the order in which they are here named, while in the second the arrangement is strictly chronological, taking up historians, philosophers and orators as they appeared upon the scene. Except in the case of the epic and the drama there is no examination of the rise or nature of any particular form of composition, and the exceptions merely touch the familiar ground of the origin of the Homeric poems and the rise of the AEschylean tragedy. Some account is given of the principal authors, their works are more or less fully enumerated and some of them analyzed, style and similar matters are discussed in a summary and decisive tone--critics, ancient and modern, who have held different views from those of Mr. Mahaffy being sharply reprehended--and the final sections of some of the chapters are devoted to bibliography, including modern imitations and translations. Although Mr. Mahaffy is never otherwise than terse--or, more properly speaking, curt--he sometimes condescends to repetition. Thus he tells us in three or four different places that Sophocles and Thucydides "play at hide-and-seek with the reader." These two authors, thus happily classed together, represent "the artificial obscurity of the Attic epoch," in distinction from "the pregnant obscurity" of Heracleitus and AEschylus and "the redundant obscurity of some modern poets." The attempt of "Classen and others" to explain the involutions and anacolutha of Thucydides by "the undeveloped condition of Attic prose, and the difficulties of wrestling with an unformed idiom to express adequately great and pregnant thoughts," is triumphantly refuted by the statement that "Euripides and Cratinus had already perfected the use of Attic Greek in dramatic dialogue," and "in Attic prose Antiphon had already attained clearness, as we can see in his extant speeches." As Classen, in his discussion of the question, has not omitted to notice Antiphon, it may be doubted whether he would accept this fact as conclusive. Another point in regard to Thucydides is introduced in a manner that prepares us for some startling disclosures: "As regards the historian's trustworthiness, it has been so universally lauded that it is high time to declare how far his statements are to be accepted as absolute truths." But expectation subsides when we are assured in the next sentence that "on contemporary facts his authority is very good, and so far there has been no proof of any inaccuracy brought home to him." He is open to doubt, it appears, "only when he goes into archaeology," by which term Mr. Mahaffy understands early Sicilian history, which "reaches back three hundred years, nay to three hundred years before the advent of the Greeks." It has "only lately," it appears, been discovered that Thucydides had no personal knowledge of the events of that remote period, but "copied from Dionysius of Syracuse," and hence "the whole tradition requires careful