This is the only certain composition of Adrian that has been preserved, though he is reported to have attempted many forms of literature. The authenticity of a letter ascribed to him with a reference to the Christians, is open to grave doubt. But now the sands of Egypt, which are daily yielding up so many secrets of antiquity, have given us what purports to be a private letter addressed by the Emperor Adrian to his successor, Antoninus Pius, and--what is more interesting--it is written, like the address to his soul, in view of his approaching death. Unfortunately the papyrus is very fragmentary, but its general meaning seems clear. We have evidently only the commencement of an elaborate epistle. After the assertion that his death is neither unexpected, nor lamentable, nor unreasonable, he says that he is prepared to die, though he misses his correspondent's presence and loving care. He goes on: "I do not intend to give the conventional reasons of philosophy for this attitude, but to make a plain statement of facts.... My father by birth died at the age of forty, a private person, so that I have lived more than half as long again as my father, and have reached about the same age as that of my mother when she died." All this accords with the known facts about Adrian. He died at the age of sixty-two, after a long illness, during which he was assiduously tended by Antoninus. Just before the end he withdrew to Baiae, leaving Antoninus in charge at Rome. His father had died when his son was ten years old; of his mother we know nothing. _Prima facie_, there is no improbability that letters of Adrian should be in circulation in Egypt, which he visited at least once. His freedman Phlegon is reported to have published a collection of them after his death. On the other hand, it should be frankly admitted that some suspicious circumstances attach to the letter. Of the antiquity of the papyrus there is no doubt, for the handwriting cannot be later than the end of the second century A. D., bringing it within sixty years (at farthest) from Adrian's death. But it is written as a school exercise on the back of a taxing-list, which naturally gives rise to the suspicion that it may be merely the composition of the schoolmaster. The actual form of the document is interesting. At the top are about fifteen lines, written in a clear cursive, or running, hand. Below, the first five lines are repeated in large, irregular uncials, or capital letters. It is impossible not to recognize here an exercise set by a schoolmaster and a copy begun by a pupil. The papyrus is one of the many found by Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt while excavating in the Fayoum on account of the Egypt Exploration Fund, and appears in the volume issued by the Graeco-Roman Branch of Egypt Exploration Fund, called "Fayoum Towns and Their Papyri." _J. S. Cotton in Biblia for November, 1900._