CURRENT LITERATURE.
Catena Classicorum : Demosthenes, with English Notes. Part I. De Corona. By the Rev. Arthur Holmes, M.A. (Rivington.)—Mr. Holmes has compressed into a convenient shape the enormous mass of annota- tion which has been accumulated by critics, English and foreign, on Demosthenes' famous oration, and he has made no trifling contributions of his own. He appears to us to deal successfully with most of the difficulties which preceding commentators have failed to solve,—diftl-
°allies, it may be observed, which are rather historical than critical, and which, for the most part, arise in the endeavour to reconcile the plain grammatical sense of the orator's words with known facts. Mr. Holmes's theory is "that the orator's statements are just true in the letter, just barely true, and no more, anything but explicit, and very likely to convey a false impression to the hearers." In purely critical questions the notes show all the subtle scholarship which we should expect from so renowned a classic as Mr. Holmes. If we note any one peculiar excellence, it is the accuracy with which the shades of differ- ent') of meaning in the various uses of the tenses are noted, and nothing, as we need hardly say, could be more important in annotation on an oration which has for its subject-matter history partly contemporary, partly belonging to the recent past.
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