lesser friends, (γ) to his freedmen at the same board, but of fare graduated according to degree. Pliny tells his correspondent that he demurred to this procedure to his next neighbour at table, and propounded his own practice on this wise: "I invite people to dine, not to be invidiously ticketed, and I treat as my entire equals in all respects those whom I have already made my equals by inviting them at my table." And this equality, for the time being, he extended to his freedmen, on the sensible point of view that they were then his guests, not his freedmen. In the same book (letter 15) occurs a letter of Pliny to Valerianus, brief enough for quotation, and yet expressing with lively brevity more than one home truth for those who realize Horace's sketch, "O si angulus iste proximus accedat." "How," he asks, "does your old Marsian property treat you? And your new purchase? Are you pleased with the estate now that it is your own? Indeed, nothing is so agreeable when you have once got it, as it was when you longed to have it. As for me, the farms which I inherited from my mother treat me but so-so: yet they delight me as coming from my mother; and besides, long endurance has hardened me: constant growling comes to this at last, that one is ashamed to growl." Next but one to this letter comes one of those charming descriptions which are, _par excellence_, Pliny's _chefs d'œuvre_, minutely detailing the features and attractions of his villas. These constitute to the young student so many _loci classici_, by no means to be overlooked in preparation for facing the test-paper of a scholarship examination, and it is sound counsel to candidates for such to avail themselves of a translation like Mr. Lewis's for general purposes, taking such letters as the one alluded to (II. xvii.) for special study and comparison with its original. Here, as elsewhere, Mr. Lewis adds pertinent and sensible notelets in cases of difficulty; but it is only fair to say _à propos_ of the, as he would seem to imply in his preface, long-since shelved translation of Melmoth, that in Bohn's Classical Library (George Bell & Sons) will be found a revision and correction of _The Letters of Caius Plinius Cœcilius Secundus_, as translated by Melmoth, annotated and otherwise accommodated to modern reading by the Rev. F. C. T. Bosanquet, B.A., of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, which will be found in all respects excellently suited for the need of the current reader. Whilst here and there the style of Melmoth strikes us as forgetting itself for a brief space, where the modern editor has felt bound to interpose a more literal rendering, and in such cases it is simpler to refer to the uniform translation of Lewis, it is certainly a real boon to have the notes of Bosanquet's Melmoth's Pliny to consult, whether they represent the explanatory and illustrative labour of Melmoth, and his literary or antiquarian contemporaries, or the careful supplementary illustrations