Of mere correctness we do not speak. Correctness is cheap. It may be had for money any day. A passage or two we notice, concerning which some slight question might, perhaps, be opened; but it would be a question of no importance; and the criticism we should be inclined to make might not be sustained. Unquestionably the version is true, even nicely true, to the ideas of the author. But it is more and better. It is ingenious, felicitous, witty. Mr. Higginson has the great advantage over too many translators (into English, at least) of being not only a man of bright and vivid intelligence, but also a proper proficient in the use of his mother tongue, melodious in movement, elegant in manner, fortunate in phrase. Now that Hawthorne is dead, America has not perhaps a writer who is master of a more graceful prose. His style has that tempered and chaste vivacity, that firm lightness of step, that quickness at a turn, not interfering with continuity and momentum, which charms all whom style can charm. Lowell's best prose--in "Fireside Travels," for example--has similar qualities, and adds to them a surprising delicacy of wit and subtilty of phrase, while it has less movement and less of rhythmical emphasis. Between the two, in the respects mentioned, we are hardly able to choose. Mr. Higginson is, indeed, a little fastidious, a little inclined to purism, a little rigid upon the mint, anise, and cumin of literary law. But this rendered him only the more fit for his present task. A translator must bear somewhat hard upon minor obligations to his vernacular, in order to overcome the resistance of a foreign idiom. He has succeeded. He has given us Greek thought in English speech, not merely in English words. It is, indeed, astonishing how modern Epictetus seems in this version. This is due in part to the translator's tact in finding modern _equivalents_ for Greek idioms, or for antiquated allusions and illustrations. Once in a while one is a littled startled by these; but more often they are so happy that one fancies he must have thrown dice for them, or obtained them by some other turn of luck.