Reading, however, is idle work, and idleness was impossible to Froude.

On his return from South Africa, where everything was being done which he thought least wise, he took up a classical subject, and began to write a book about Caesar.

He read Cicero, Plutarch, Suetonius, Caesar himself, and produced early in 1879 a volume which was always a particular favourite of his own.

"I believe," he said to Skelton, "it is the best book I have ever written." The public did not altogether agree with him, and it never became so popular as Short Studies.
Yet it is undoubtedly a brilliant performance, with just the qualities which might have been expected to make it popular, and a second edition was soon required.

It is interesting from the first page to the last, and its whole object is to show that the Roman world in the last days of the Republic was very like the English world under Queen Victoria.