Some minor points of similarity may be briefly noted. As we read the _Anacharsis_, we are reminded of the modern prominence of athletics; the question of football _versus_ drill is settled for us; light is thrown upon the question of conscription; we think of our Commissions on national deterioration, and the schoolmaster's wail over the athletic _Frankenstein's_ monster which, like _Eucrates_ in _The Liar_, he has created but cannot control. The 'horsy talk in every street' of the _Nigrinus_ calls up the London newsboy with his 'All the winners.' We think of palmists and spiritualists in the police-courts as we read of Rutilianus and the Roman nobles consulting the impostor Alexander. This sentence reads like the description of a modern man of science confronted with the supernatural: 'It was an occasion for a man whose intelligence was steeled against such assaults by scepticism and insight, one who, if he could not detect the precise imposture, would at any rate have been perfectly certain that, though this escaped him, the whole thing was a lie and an impossibility.' The upper-class audiences who listened to Lucian's readings, taking his points with quiet smiles instead of the loud applause given to the rhetorician, must have been something like that which listens decorously to an Extension lecturer. When Lucian bids us mark 'how many there are who once were but cyphers, but whom words have raised to fame and opulence, ay, and to noble lineage too,' we remember not only Gibbon's remark about the very Herodes Atticus of whom Lucian may have been thinking ('The family of Herod, at least after it had been favoured by fortune, was lineally descended from Cimon and Miltiades'), but also the modern _carriere ouverte aux talents_, and the fact that Tennyson was a lord. There are the elements of a socialist question in the feelings between rich and poor described in the _Saturnalia_; while, on the other hand, the fact of there being an audience for the _Dialogues of the Hetaerae_ is an illustration of that spirit of _humani nihil a me alienum puto_ which is again prevalent today. We care now to realize the thoughts of other classes besides our own; so did they in Lucian's time; but it is significant that Francklin in 1780, refusing to translate this series, says: 'These dialogues exhibit to us only such kind of conversation as we may hear in the purlieus of Covent Garden—lewd, dull, and insipid.' The lewdness hardly goes beyond the title; they are full of humour and insight; and we make no apology for translating most of them. Lastly, a generation that is always complaining of the modern over-production of books feels that it would be at home in a state of society in which our author found that, not to be too singular, he must at least write about writing history, if he declined writing it himself, even as Diogenes took to rolling his tub, lest he should be the only idle man when Corinth was bustling about its defences.