consideration." In that case, we fear, the "high time" for deciding on the "absolute truth" of the historian's statements will have to be indefinitely postponed. Meantime we learn from the work before us the striking fact, that "the night-escape of the Plateans from their city," as related in the third book of Thucydides, "has been reproduced in our own day by Sir E. Creasy, in his Greek novel, _The Old Love and the New_." It has sometimes been debated whether the Greeks had any novels: it is now settled that they had one--written by an Englishman. It is to be hoped that this discovery will give a new impetus to the interest in Greek literature, which must be at a low ebb if Mr. Mahaffy be correct in stating that "even diligent scholars find it a task to read a dialogue of Plato honestly through." To be sure, if Plato's style and matter were simply such as Mr. Mahaffy describes them, there would be no great inducement to make the attempt. The same remark would apply to most of the extant plays of Sophocles. The _Oedipus Rex_, in particular, reveals itself in Mr. Mahaffy's analysis as a mere farrago of inconsistencies and absurdities. In allusion to the very different estimate of Professor Campbell, Mr. Mahaffy remarks, "Though I deeply respect this simple-hearted enthusiasm, it does not appear to me the best way of stimulating the study of any writer." Still, Mr. Mahaffy can occasionally defend a Greek author against the strictures of other critics. Thus he cannot agree with Mr. Simcox in giving "some credence to the attacks on Demosthenes charging him with unchastity. These," he observes, "the whole man's life and his portrait-statue forbid us to believe." We do not quite understand how the fact that Demosthenes was a "whole man" tends to rebut the charge referred to, and if what Mr. Mahaffy meant to say be "the man's whole life," this is simply begging the question, a part of that whole being the point of dispute. But the evidence of the "portrait-statue" is, of course, resistless, and one cannot but regret, in the interests of public decency, that testimony so conclusive is not admitted in modern trials involving a similar issue. One great characteristic of Mr. Mahaffy's style is an unsparing use of the first personal pronoun. "I think," "I do not think," "I conceive," "I believe," "I advocate," "I infer," "I would select," "I had predicted," are forms of expression strewn abundantly, often in clusters, over the pages of the work, the subject to which they refer being generally one on which most other people do not "think" or "conceive" as Mr. Mahaffy does. One is reminded of an epigram on Whewell, master of Trinity College (Oxford, not Dublin), after the appearance of his _Plurality of Worlds_: His eye, as it ranges through boundless infinity, Finds the chief work of God the master of Trinity. William Cowper. By Goldwin Smith. (English-Men-of-Letters Series.) New York: Harper & Brothers.