Glasgow Courier. — 1857-11-19 (Glasgow, Strathclyde, Scotland)

WIT, LIAM RAMSAY, M.A., rrin. Coll., Camb.; Professor of Humanity in the University of Glasgow. Glasgow: It. Griffin & Co., Publishers to the University. 1857. This is a work of which we have few examples in this country, although such putlications are core mow enacts on the continent, ea Veers in England ; and though Professor Ramsay tells us, with characteristic modesty, that it is intended' for the use of his students,' and that he has ' striven to adapt it especially to their wants,' we may very confidently add that his hope that it may prove serviceable to more advanced scholars' will be fulfilled We are accustomed to consider Cicero an easy writer simply because we have been used to extracts from his works when schoolboys,just as for a similar reason we talk of Virgil, the most learned, and in many senses, the most difficult of the Latin poets, as easy, though, when we come to try to understand him thoroughly in after life, we find it no such easy matter; not that in the case of either Cicero or Virgil it is the mere language that puzzles us but the different senses in which that language is employed, the force of particular phrases, the meaning of particular allusions, and the technicalities, ' whether of law, philosophy, or agriculture, in which they indulge. It is easy enough to skim over the pages of the Georgics, for instance, and to gather from them a general idea of the sense of the passages we have glanced at; but in a critical perusal—which is alone satisfactory—we are stopped at every turn by unexpected difficulties, and are embarrassed by the provoking discovery of an unexpected amount of utter ignorance. We don't understand what we are reading, and if we would understand it we must go to work slowly and steadily, and consult such authorities, whether in the shape of dictionaries or commentaries, snare within our reach. So of Cicero, who is a very hard author to master if such be our intention, for notwithstanding his flow of musical language, his well balanced periods, and his occasional bursts of impassioned eloquence, he abounds, particularly in his orations, in juridical and conventional peculiarities of speech which nobody but a ripe scholar and a classical antiquary, like Mr Ramsay, can explain. In the 'Prolegomena' the history of the case is given with much clearness, and as it is extracted solely from the speech, such a compilation must have been a work of great labour; but what a pie ture of Italian domestic life in the century imme diately preceding the commencement of the Christian wra does it present? and low plainly does it show the necessity for a higher standard of moral action than could be supplied by the philosophy of either Greece or Rome? It arises out of a provincial tragedy occurring in a family of distinction at Lan. num in Apulia, the dramatis personce of which are a mother, a son, a step-father, a daughter, several collateral connexions, male and femele, and a daughter-in-law. The contest is about money, the crimes committed to obtain it, the forgery of wills and murder by poisoning; and the speech now edited and illustrated with so much skill by Professor Ramsay was delivered on the occasion of a second trial which grew out of a previous one, and which not only ended favourably for the defendant —Cluentius—but led to the reversal of a judgment that had been formerly given on the case. This speech, therefore, be. sides its value as a piece of forensic eloquence, has a direct bearing on the social morality of the age and country in which Cicero lived; and shows that usages which we are apt to look upon as merely poetical exaggerations when we meet with the mention of them afterwards in the writings of Horace and Juvenal, were common to Roman society before their time, and were indicative of its incurable corruption.  The text which Mr Ramsay has adopted is the result of a careful collation of the texts ot Orelli and Classen, and the 'Notes'—which are both numerous and copious—contain, as might be expected, a vast body of knowledge, and display literary resources of the most ample kind. There can be no doubt, therefore, that this volume will become a Ciceronian handbook in all our colleges and schools, and it richly deserves to be one.