Mr. Forsyth was induced to write this work by the belief that the time had come when another Life of Cicero than Middleton's famous work might be acceptable to the public. We are glad that such is his belief; for we cannot have too many books on the last days of the Roman Republic, if they are written by competent men,--and there can be no doubt as to Mr. Forsyth's competency to write on those memorable times. But we do not think that his work, pleasing and useful as it is, will exclude that of Middleton from libraries that are collected for use rather than show. Middleton's book may be, as it has been called, "a lying legend in honor of St. Tully"; but it is an able work for all that, and does honor to the eighteenth century. It has many faults, yet it shows an amount of ability that we do not often find in the historical works of our time. It was written when Roman history was but little understood, when men gravely spoke of the Rumelian legend, and ranked it as an historical fact with the crossing of the Rubicon by Cæsar. The dullest graduate of to-day knows much about Rome that would have astonished Conyers Middleton, precisely as the dullest of our soldiers knows much about war that would have astonished Napoleon; but the graduate is as much beneath Middleton as the soldier is beneath Napoleon. We must test Middleton's Cicero by the literary standard of Middleton's age; and thus tested, no one qualified to give an opinion on the subject can hesitate to say that it is a production of great excellence. Were Middleton now living, he would have written a far better work on Cicero and his Times than Mr. Forsyth has written; but we cannot say, much as we admire Mr. Forsyth's work, that we believe that he, had he lived a hundred and twenty years ago, would have written a better work than Middleton's. To the man who can afford time for the reading of but one of those Lives, we should say, "Read Mr. Forsyth's,"--for it is by far the more accurate, and therefore the more useful, life of the great Roman orator. But Mr. Forsyth excels Dr. Middleton in accuracy for pretty much the same reason that he can make the journey to Rome in less than half the time it required Middleton to make it. The labors of others have cleared the way for historians as well as for travellers; and to praise historians for their superior accuracy would be about as sagacious as it would be to praise travellers for their superior speed. We feel grateful to the writers of former times, and we hold it to be the duty of all to do those writers justice, even if their books should cease to be authorities. Who would think contemptuously of Newton because he never saw a steamship?