It was left for Professor Mommsen to discover.

Froude, always on the look-out for examples of his theory, or his father's theory, that orators must be useless and mistaken, seized it with an eager gasp.

An agreeable looseness of treatment pervades the book, and "patricians" appear as wealthy leaders of fashionable society, being in fact a small number of old Roman families, who might be poor, or in trade, and could not legally under the Republic be increased in number, resembling rather a Hindu caste than any institution of Western Christendom.

In Caesar's time they had almost died out, and the aristocracy of the day was an aristocracy of office.

The book, however, though far from faultless, though in some respects misleading, has a singular fascination, the charm of a picture drawn by the hand of a master with consummate skill.