Friends of the Olden Time. By Alice Gardner. (E. Arnold.)—
Miss Gardner devotes her first chapter to " The Old Egyptians," of whose daily life, government, literature, &c., she gives a popular account. The rest of her volume gives notable characters taken from Greek and Roman history,—Solon, Leonidas, Pericles, Socrates, and Alexander, from the former ; Camillus, Hannibal, the Gracchi, and the younger Cato, from the latter. She has taken pains to go to good authorities, and has produced bright pictures of the great men whom she describes, fulfilling fairly enough the object which she puts before herself in the preface, "to present before the eyes of children a few typical and significant characters in such a way that their personality may be strongly realised, and a living interest given to their history." We have no fault to find with her work, except to remark that her facts are not quite exact in the chapter on Socrates. a juvenis, but hardly " a young man," when the Peloponnesian War broke out (431), if, as is sup posed, he was seventy in the year of his death (399). This is a trifle, however. It is a more serious mistake that his courageous resistance to the Thirty Tyrants in the matter of Leon of Salamis is said to have been before his refusal to put the question to the vote in the assembly held for the* trial of the commanders at Arginusie.
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