Cicero's Oration "Pro Lege Manilid." Edited by Thomas Nash, MA.
(Longmans.)—This is a text-book provided for the use of students preparing for the Cambridge Local Examination, and is certainly a very good specimen of its kind. The notes are all that can be desired. Indeed, it is very rarely that we should wish to differ from Mr. Nash. In the pas- sage, " Verum tamen ills imperatoribus lens eat tribuenda quod egerunt, venia danda quod reliquerunt," we doubt whether "for their energy" is the best rendering of "quod egercmt," which, as being contrasted with "quod reliquerunt," might be properly represented by "for what they did," as opposed to "for what they left undone." We have been care- fully through the whole oration, and find little else to criticise. Mr. Nash has adopted the excellent plan of supplying the scholar with the information which he is commonly told to search for in classical diction- aries. He might have carried it out more completely, even at the cost of increasing the bulk of the notes. The only serious fault, in fact, that we have to find with him, relates to the habit which he has of obtruding upon his readers opinions about the characters of CicsA and Pompey, and about Roman politics, which it would have been better to omit. Mr. Nash has had, of course, plenty of opportunities of forming these opinions for himself from the study of the authorities on the subject, but young lads who will use his book must take them at second-hand from him, and whether the opinions are right or wrong, nothing can be. less profitable than this. It may be true that Pompey was a cruel and cold-blooded schemer, and Cicero an unprincipled self-seeker, but these' are judgments which it is not well to accept on the ipso dint of any one.
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