A Golden Treasury of Greek Prose. By R. S. Wright,
M.A., and J. E. L. Shadwell, M.A. (Clarendon Press.)—There is a great difference of opinion about the utility of books of extracts for the purposes of a teacher. There are purists who insist that a boy should never be allowed —at least till he has reached the last stage of his schoolboy course—to read anything but Attic Greek. To some extent we agree with them. Yet it is of the highest importance to give a boy a general idea of Greek litera- ture. Even if we do lose something in the matter of form, we get a more than corresponding gain in the substance of knowledge acquired. Such a view we get here. The selection covers a period of more than a thousand years, from Pherecydes of Syros to Agathias. A teacher, of course, must use his discretion in selecting his pupils' reading, and will
find abundance of materials. Writers of the "Attic age" proper occupy more than two-fifths of the whole, and those who belong to the "Alex- andrine age," and many of those whose works illustrate the revived Atticism of the Empire, may, for practical purposes, bo included in the same class. The value of the notes it is difficult to appraise without a more detailed examination than we are able to give to them. We have tested them in one of the speeches from Thucydides, and find thorn satisfactory, though, perhaps, scarcely full enough. The introduction we can praise without reserve.
Previous page
