A Companion to School Classics. By James Gow, M.A., Litt.D.
(Macmillan and Co.)—This is an excellent book, giving in a most compact and convenient form a mass of information which will be most useful to young students, and, indeed, to not a few students who are no longer young. We can easily believe Dr. Gow when he tells us that he has "found it excessively difficult to produce the summaries here collected." They are manifestly the outcome of a very wide and careful reading. Any expert will know at once that this modest volume of three hundred odd pages represents labour of no common variety and extent. The forty pages, for instance, which are devoted to textual criticism, with the cognate subject of the "History of Classical Manuscripts," &c., are full of facts which it must have cost much toil to collect. We know of nothing like the section headed "Apparatus Criticus," which tells us succinctly about the manuscripts of the chief classical writers. Among the other items, we may notice the chapters on Athenian government and military and naval strength; on Sparta; on Roman government, under subdivisions of Regal, Republican, and Imperial; the Drama, Greek and Latin ; and Philosophy. No more valuable addition has been made of late years to school literature than this.. We see no mention in the list of scholars of Poggio (Bracciolini). Few men had more to do with the revival of letters in Italy.
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