with the origin of our modern parties that justice where her reputation is concerned is scarcely to be looked for. Little has been said for King John; and Mr. Woolryche's kind attempt to reconcile men to the name of Jeffreys has proved a total failure. Strafford has about as many admirers as enemies among those who know his history, but this is due more to the manner of his death than to any love of his life: of so much more importance is it that men should die well than live well, so far as the judgement of posterity is concerned with their actions. Strafford's master, who so scandalously abandoned him to the headsman, owes the existence of the party that still upholds his conduct to the dignified manner in which he faced death, a death at which the whole world "assisted," or might have done so. Catiline, we believe, has found no formal defender, but the Catilinarian Conspiracy is now generally admitted to have been the Popish Plot of antiquity, with an ounce of truth to a pound of falsehood in the narratives of it that have come down to us from Rome's revolutionary age, in political pamphlets and party orations. Cicero's craze on the subject, and that tendency which all men have to overrate the value of their own actions, have made of the business in his lively pages a much more consequential affair than it really was. The fleas in the microscope, and there it will ever remain, to be mistaken for a monster. Truly, the Tullian gibbeted the gentleman of the Sergian _gens_. It must be confessed that Catiline was a proper rascal. How could he have been anything else, and be one of Sulla's men? And a proper rascal is an improper character of the very worst kind. Still, we should like to have had his marginal "notes" on Cicero's speeches, and on Sallust's job pamphlet. They would have been mighty interesting reading,--as full of lies, probably, as the matter commented on, but not the less attractive on that account. What dull affairs libraries would be, if they contained nothing but books full of truth! The Greek tyrants have found defenders, and it has been satisfactorily made out that they were the cleverest men of their time, and that, if they did occasionally bear rather hard upon individuals, it was only because those individuals were so unreasonable as not to submit to be robbed or killed in a quiet and decorous manner. Mr. Grote's rehabilitation of the Greek sophists is a miracle of ingenuity and sense, and does as much honor to the man who wrote it as justice to the men of whom it is written.