was to become a man of letters. My monument was to have been the Greek Life of the Second Century after Christ. But life shapes itself in its own way. I have become a grammarian and my monument is to be the Monte Testaccio of a philological journal. Still I have never lost my interest either in literature or in the period, and regret that I have only space for a Brief Mention of Professor ROBINSON ELLIS'S instructive and entertaining lecture on the Correspondence of Fronto and Marcus Aurelius. Marcus has his admirers, and I should blush to reproduce my early notes on his Meditations and my gibes at the man whom I scrupled not to call in his own jargon a piloσopídiov and a piloσopápiov. But Fronto's cause I was inclined to espouse, perhaps out of sheer contrariness. For Fronto has been badly treated. Every man whose heart is in the right place has a sneaking kindness for the author he edits, even if that author be a hopeless prig, like Persius, or an incondite writer, like Justin Martyr. But Fronto has had scant mercy shewn him even by his editors. True, some allowance must be made for the disillusionment of Mai's discovery. Historians of Roman literature had said to themselves, 'If we only had Fronto!' And when we had Fronto, or a specimen of Fronto, what? So they began to make epigrams on Fronto; and Naber, whose edition (1867) is still the latest critical edition, apologized for giving so many months to such a zany, such a 'fatuus' as Fronto. He admits, indeed, that Fronto was a good soul, but he sneers at what he calls 'decantata illa populi Romani felicitas sub Antoninorum imperio', warns us, quite unnecessarily, not to be deceived 'Frontonis elegantiis et orationis putido ornatu', and considers the most valuable outcome of the whole collection to be the exposure of that weak brother, Marcus Aurelius. A charming contrast to this crabbedness is Gaston Boissier's sympathetic article in the Revue des deux Mondes, published the year after Naber's edition, and while Professor ELLIS refrains from any estimate of Fronto's intellectual capacity, he has done good service to the memory of the good old African by his summaries and his translations. Surely after reading Professor ELLIS, no young student will consider the Correspondence a negligible quantity, even if he should have little sympathy with the gush of the letters. This gush, this overflow of affection, in which it is sometimes hard to tell whether the greater spilth is on the side of the master or on that of the disciple, reminds Professor ELLIS of the Sonnets of Shakespeare. In modern life such enthusiasm is more familiar to us in school-girl ecstatics for the beloved mistress, but this sort of thing seems to be traditional 'There seems little reason' says an irresponsible reviewer in the New York Sun, June 24, 1903, 'for the inclusion in Trent's American Literature> of the names of scholars like Drisler and Anthon and Goodwin and Gildersleeve, whose purely literary baggage is of the slightest'. Is it not Voltaire who says: On ne va pas à la postérité avec de gros bagages? in the Empire. Famous is the relation between Cornutus and Persius and the absurdly interjectional letter of Marcus to Fronto (II 3) is paralleled by the absurdly interjectional letter of Julian to Libanius (XIV) and Julian's letters to Iamblichos are so effusive that critics have thought them unworthy (Essays and Studies, p. 375) of the later emperor, a more masculine character after all than the earlier philosopher on the throne. The Quatrains of Háli, a modern Hindu poet, whose_real name, we are told, is Maulavi Sayid Altaf Husain Ansári Pánipati, have been edited in the Roman character with a prose translation by Mr. G. E. WARD (London, Henry Frowde). While they hardly deserve the transfiguration that the quatrains of Omar have undergone, one of them may be worth quoting, No. XVIII, which is intended to be a severe rebuke to hasty critics of standard text-books. Saith Háli: Set not good men down as bad, O my son! If one gesture or half a gesture of theirs displease thee. But, despite Háli, I am naturally inclined to agree with the saying of Ecclesiastes about 'dead flies' and with Tennyson's deprecation of 'the little pitted speck in garner'd fruit'; and, moreover, I am suffering just now from a couple of typographical errors that disfigure for me hopelessly p. 229 of the current volume, where 1.9 for 'every' read 'my' and 1. 10 for 'final' read 'first'. R. S. R.: Questions of metre and accent commonly breed extremists. Thus not long ago we had in several quarters a determined effort to eliminate 'ictus' from the Graeco-Roman poetry, as though we could not find the deviations we require from common speech equally well in the modulations of that 'poetryreciting voice' of the ancients, that μéon kivnois or λáoμa which lies midway between song and speech (Aristid. Q. I p. 7, 25 M.; Quintil. I 8, 2)! Similarly Dr. J. J. SCHLICHER in his dissertation on the Origin of Latin Rhythmical Verse (Chicago, 1900) adopts a novel position. His views may best be contrasted with those of his former teacher, Wilhelm Meyer, whom he sharply chides. for the admission that the supposed musical accent of the Romans became expiratory in the third century and capable of influencing Latin verse. Thus in Meyer's view the change from quantitative to accentual poetry was produced by some profound and farreaching cause, but according to SCHLICHER this change belongs to the chapter of accidents and is due to secondary causes. Dr. SCHLICHER seeks to show that the Roman quantitative system broke down first especially in the final syllables of words, and since the Christian iambic poets did not wish to give prominence to these dubious syllables by placing them under the verse-accent, they preferred, because of their scruples about quantity, to write Fit porta Christi pérviá rather than Portá Christi fit pérvia. The conscientious scruples about quantity which this hypothesis attributes to the Christian poets will seem to many wholly unwarranted by the facts, and even if they were well warranted, this explanation would leave the real difficulty untouched. For the question would still remain, why the final syllables became unstable in their quantity and were finally sloughed off altogether. Trivial causes apart, there is but one ultimate answer to this question and that is the answer which Meyer and Havet have given, viz.: The development of the expiratory accent destroyed the old Roman syllabic system. SCHLICHER, however, has not merely written a polemic upon the accent; he has done an admirable piece of work in tracing the several stages of the slow process by which quantitative poetry became accentual, and has made valuable contributions to technical knowledge at this point, while he has given the general reader an extremely interesting and clear account of the chief problems of Christian poetry. Since the dissertation is otherwise so complete, it is to be regretted that the author has not included more actual specimens of the popular poetry. Thus the lengthening of accented short vowels might well have been illustrated by a quotation of the well-known Pompeian graffito (CLE. 44): Magi properares, ut videres Vénerem. Pompeios defer, ubi dulcis est amor. Again, St. Augustine's famous Psalmus contra partem Donati is often under discussion, but how few classical Latinists have ever seen or read the 'Omnes qui gaudetis'! S. B. P.: An excellent piece of historical criticism is the paper on The Politics of the Patrician Claudii by Professor GEORGE C. FISKE of the University of Wisconsin, published in vol. XIII of the Harvard Studies. Our ancient authorities agree in representing the Claudii as ultra-patrician in their opinions and bitterly hostile to the plebs. Modern scholars have ranged themselves either with Mommsen who regarded the Claudii as champions of the plebs; or with Herzog who accepted the ancient view in the main with the modification that this gens desired to develop a plebeian state within the patrician; or with Nitzsch who maintained that the Claudii represented the trading and com mercial interests and therefore supported the plebs urbana against the plebs rustica. Professor FISKE agrees most nearly with Nitzsch, but corrects his view in certain points, and maintains that the two chief articles in the political creed of the Claudii were first "a persistent and inherited opposition to the policy of the tribunes, the champions of the plebs rustica," and second "the defence of the libertini". This conclusion is based upon a critical examination of all the ancient testimony upon the subject. The three most important members of the Claudian family were Appius Claudius, the reputed founder of the gens and consul in 495 B. C., Appius Claudius, the decemvir, and Appius Claudius Caecus the famous censor of 312 B. C., and it is therefore inevitable that Professor FISKE's arguments should be based very largely upon the traditional history of the first two. Scholars will differ widely in their estimate of the degree of credibility to be assigned to this record, and Professor FISKE will probably be regarded as too conservative by most. But while the evidence of a traditional family policy among the Claudii is not absolutely conclusive, the careful and rational treatment of the subject is worthy of all praise. RECENT PUBLICATIONS. Thanks are due to Messrs. Lemcke & Buechner, 11 E. 17th St., New York, for material furnished. AMERICAN. Benedicti XIV Opera inedita primum publicavit Franciscus Heiner. St. Louis, Mo., B. Herder, 1904. 14+464 pp. 4to, hf. mor., $6.25 net. British School at Athens. Society for the promotion of Hellenic studies. Supplementary paper No. 4, Excavations in Phylakopi in Melos; described by T. D. Atkinson, R. C. Bosanquet, C. C. Edgar and others. New York, Macmillan, 1904. 14+279 pp. il. pls. 8vo, cl., $9 net. Brouner (Walter Brooks), and Fung Yuet Mow. Chinese made easy; with an introduction by Herbert A. Giles. New York, Macmillan, 1904. 16+351 pp. 8vo, cl., $6 net. Catulli Carmina; recognovit brevique adnotatione critica instruxit Robinson Ellis. 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