A good edition of the Catalepton has long been wanted: and Birt's recently Published ‘Erklärung,’ despite some obvious defects, may fairly be regarded as good book. It is at any rate fresh, interesting, and stimulating. The text is the whole, though not always, sensible. The commentary is full without being too full. But, more valuable still, both commentary and introduction constantly bring home to one the probability that nearly all the poems in this collection are genuinely Vergilian— ‘Jugendverse und Heimatpoesie Vergils.’ No editor before Birt has brought before us so clearly the environment out of which these poems came.