Nonius Mercellus de Compendiosa Doctrine, I-III. Edited, with Introduction and
Critical Apparatus, by the late J. H. Onions. (Clarendon Press.)—This volume, which appears under the care of Professor W. M. Lindsay, contains the work which Mr. Onions, at his lamented death in 1889, left ready for publication. Nonius Marcellus, of whose date and personality we know nothing, was a grammarian, the value of whose work lies not so much in any critical acumen of his own, as in the fact that he has preserved a number of fragments from lost Latin poets. It is he, for instance, who has saved the two elegant iambics from the satires of Ennius,—
" Enni poets salve qui mortalibus Versus propmas liammeos melullitus,"
where, for once at least, the iamb is not as rare as Horace would have us believe it is. It is needless to say that Mr. Onions' work was most laborious and correct.
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