We have just lost the veteran French scholar who did more perhaps to create and maintain such an interest than any man of his time; and I gladly here acknowledge that it was Boissier's Cicéron et ses amis that in my younger days made me first feel the reality of life and character in an age of which I then hardly knew anything but the perplexing political history.

M. Boissier has written a delightful essay on him in his Cicéron et ses amis, and Professor Tyrrell has done the like in the introduction to the fourth volume of his edition of Cicero's letters; but they have treated him less as a type of the youth of his day than as the friend and pupil of Cicero.

As M. Boissier happily says, he never cared to "ménager ses transitions.

She was, as M. Boissier has well said, the exact counterpart of her still more famous brother: "Elle apportait dans sa conduite privée, dans ses engagements d'affection, les mêmes emportements et les mêmes ardeurs que son frère dans la vie publique.

Boissier's sketch in Cicéron et ses amis, 83 foll., is quite accurate.]

This is just comment on Cato but it is at once too much and too little to say of Varro: a French academician might be proud of his antiquarian learning, but would balk at his awkward and homely Latin, as indeed one French academician, M. Boissier, has since done.

I, 176) his obligation only to veterum praecepta without naming them, but as M. Gaston Boissier says he was evidently referring to Varro "le plus moderne de tous les anciens.

The passages should be compared for, as M. Gaston Boissier has pointed out, the difference in the point of view of the two men is here illustrated by the fact that Varro appeals to purely Roman deities, while Virgil invokes the literary gods of Greece.

Virgil Ch. V. Boissier, Etudes sur M.T. Varron, Ch. IX.

[Footnote 108: This was the "crowded hour" in Varro's life, and, as M. Boissier has pointed out, he loved to dwell upon its episodes.

As M. Boissier points out Varro might have cited the beginning of the Odyssey as a precedent for this.]