subject of their conversation comes in sight—the elegant Cæsar, whom the gay youth of Rome take to be merely one of themselves, but whose features can be read more truly by those who have felt his easy mastery of whatever he attempts. Slight as this early production of Macaulay's is, it has always seemed to us to suggest how excellent a subject Cæsar would be for a writer who united the qualifications of an historian with imaginative force and dramatic power. Exact scholarship, laborious research, and literary skill have been abundantly devoted in recent times to the illustration of Cæsar's career; yet after all that has been done by Mommsen and by Drumann, by Merivale and by Long, by M. Victor Duruy and by the Imperial biographer who in his account of the Gallic campaigns has at least made a solid contribution to military archæology, one thing still remained for a writer of Cæsar's life to do—to give us a living picture of the man, faithful to such authentic traits as history has preserved, and lending unity to these by such touches as only a sympathetic imagination can supply. This is what Mr Froude has essayed to do. He has approached his subject not simply as a student of history, but also, and more peculiarly, in the spirit of a creative dramatist. An estimate of his work which aims at seizing that which is really distinctive of it will view it especially in the latter aspect. The book is not properly a critical study of the Fall of the Commonwealth; it is rather an artistic study—a "sketch" as Mr Froude calls it, a
