Phormio is explaining how, with all his ebullitions, he has never been indicted for assault:-- "Quia non rete accipitri tenditur neque miluo, Qui male faciunt nobis: illis qui nihil faciunt tenditur; Quia enim in illis fructus est, in illis opera luditur. Aliis aliunde est periclum unde aliquid abradi potest: Mihi sciunt nihil esse. Dices, ducent damnatum domum: Alere nolunt hominem edacem: et sapiunt, meâ quidem sententia, Pro maleficio si beneficium summum nolunt reddere." _Phorm._, act. ii. 2. "Because we do not spread nets for hawks and kites that do us harm; the net is spread for the harmless birds. The fact is, pigeons may be plucked: hawks and kites mock our pains. Various dangers beset people who can be pilfered--I am known to have nothing. You will say, 'They will get a writ of _habeas corpus_.' They would rather not keep a large eater: and I certainly think they are right to decline requiting a bad turn with a signal favour." * * * * * From a summary notice of these two volumes of wider range and scope, it is an easy leap to such noteworthy classical translations and texts of the year or season as lie on our table for review. Of the former we note with satisfaction a new and very readable version of _The Letters of the Younger Pliny_, literally translated by John Delaware Lewis, M.A. (London: Trubner & Co., 1879), whose version of Juvenal's Satires some years back was accurate, lively, and well-achieved. In approaching another author of the silver age, well deserving of a more modern English transcript than those of Melmoth and Lord Orrery, Mr. Lewis has been minded to present this pleasantest of gossips, and most cultured of letter-writers, in a guise as little as possible encumbered with notes or excursions, and in such wise that the volume is admirably adapted for the library table, whether the object be comparison with the Latin text, or refreshment of the memory, anent this or that sentiment of the many-sided and voluminous man of law and letters. Under the conviction that enough has been done to present Pliny himself to his readers in the volumes by Church and Brodribb (in the Ancient Classics), and by Pritchard and Bernard, as well as the notices of life and letters by W. S. Teuffel and English bibliographers, Mr. Lewis has confined himself to the briefest of introductions, and been content to bestow most pains on apt and parallel English counterparts to the expressions and idioms of the Latin. Thus the task undertaken has been made to assume an easy, unaffected form, at the same time that it is calculated to stand close examination by the criterion of the Latin text. A good specimen both of the gossiping author and his latest translator might be cited from Book II. 6 to Avitus, in which is described the triple-graded dinner given by a shabby, purse-proud host (α) to himself and his intimates, (β) to his