13 JULY 1907, Page 25

Notes on Xenophon and Others. By Herbert Richards. (E. Grant

Richards. 6s. net.)—Mr. Richards gives us in this volume a number of textual and other notes on Xenophon, Herodotns, Plutarch, and other Greek writers. He adds a few remarks, critical and other, on Catullus and Juvenal. The main purpose of his volume is to discuss the genuineness of the minor works of Xenophon, his conclusion being that there is no valid reason for questioning it. The sceptical Hardouin, who condemned four- fifths of the accepted classics, has a succession of followers, though few venture on conclusions so sweeping. A German scholar of considerable eminence, quoted by Mr. Richards, came to the conclusion that all the satires of Juvenal could not have proceeded from the same author. The famous Tenth fell under his ban ; it was too rhetorical, he thought, to be by the writer, say, of the Sixteenth, which certainly has not much of the grand style about it. The difficulty is, how are we to account for those very clever people who, being wholly careless of their own fame, made it the business of their lives to imitate well-known writers ? In religions literature the case is different. It was an act of piety for a Jew to put his reflections under the protection, so to speak, of Solomon's name. But here no such motive is imaginable.