Professor Bernays is among the few who possess the art of writing what can be read by men of culture as well as by professional scholars and historians; a monograph from his pen is sure to be at once a real contribution to knowledge, full of striking and original suggestions, and a work of literature, written with the attention to form and finish which we admire in some of the classic productions of a former age. The present work on Lucian and the Cynics is in every respect a worthy companion to the Theophrastus on Piety published in 1866. Though it is shorter and less elaborate in details than its predecessor, the subject is one which allows of a more consecutive mode of statement, and has perhaps in itself a more immediate interest for the general reader. Prof. Bernays now deals with an aspect of the civilization of the Roman empire, in which he demonstrates—what to many of us, I suppose, will be a sort of revelation—the existence of a popular religious movement, distinct from the established Paganism and from the philosophies of the schools. This new interpretation of Cynicism enables us to realize the fact that the Cynic of the first and second centuries was not a philosophical oddity, to be relegated to a chapter of a history of ancient philosophy, but a religious reformer at a moment when the Greek world seemed to have lost the power of religious initiative, and the spokesman of a kind of popular opposition when opposition to the existing political order of things was least to be expected.