CURRENT LITERATURE.
Marci Tullii Ciceronis de Natura Deorum. Translated by Francis Brooks, M.A. (Methuen and Co.)—This is an accurate and
scholarly version of a treatise which presents considerable diffi- culties, some, no doubt, traceable to the abstruse nature of the subject and the metaphysical and somewhat discursive mode of reasoning adopted by the champion of the Stoical orthodoxy, but most arising from the corruption of manuscripts and the carelessness of earlier editors. Mr. Brooks has adopted the text of Mayor, the most correct and carefully prepared that we are acquainted with. Some of his renderings may be deemed at first sight a little paraphrastical, but this was from the nature of the discussion unavoidable, and so far from constituting an impedi- ment, will rather prove intellectually beneficial to an energetic student. We believe that portions of Cicero's ethical writings are read in some of the most important of our seminaries, and if so this book will prove a valuable auxiliary, but we cannot re- commend the philosophic literature of Rome or Hellas as a proper study for schoolboys, the majority of whom are not, and probably never will be, philosophers, while the few who exhibit any tendency in that direction too often prove unbearable nuisances.
The proper species of literature for our youth while in. statu pupillari is the narrative, poetical and prosaic, and he who cannot appreciate Xenophon and Homer, Canal. and Ovid or Virgil, will certainly fail to comprehend Thucydides and Pindar, the ethics of Aristotle, or the "De Finibus " of Cicero. Our limits prevent us from discussing how far the orators of Rome and Athens should be read in ordinary schools, and indeed this will finally depend on the subject-matter and style of the speech. But after matriculation in any university worthy of the name the philo- sophical treatises of the Roman sage will be found a pleasing and profitable introduction to the more recondite speculations of Plato and Aristotle, though we must confess that we value the Tusculan questions and the " De Officiis " far beyond the rather too lengthy " Natura Deorum." The present writer remembers vividly the pleasure he felt in his undergraduate days in studying these treatises and discovering in them the germs of many of the strongest arguments of Butler and Paley. Cicero, though in practice almost a Stoic, was in the main a disciple of the Old Academy, i.e., a follower of Socrates and Plato, and hence equally averse from the dogmatism of Zeno and Epicurus and the frivolous scepticism of Pyrrho and some later sects. His doctrine, that demonstration, when we pass beyond the pale of mathematics, can be rarely if ever arrived at, and that accurate reasoning from probabilities is of vital and even universal importance both for the formation of opinions and the conduct of life, should be care- fully impressed upon the rising generation, whose besetting temptation—we might almost say sin—is a presumptuous precipitancy of positive judgment. We earnestly hope that Mr. Brooks will give us an opportunity of commenting more extensively on Hellenic philosophy as expounded by the greatest of Roman statesmen.
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