When I was looking through some old books and papers recently, before committing them to the salvage dump, my attention was caught by two Italian books which, with several other volumes, had been salvaged from my house which had been blasted in one of the Mersey-side raids.

Glancing quickly through them I discovered in one of the volumes a source of interest and a certain amount of inspiration, as a result of which I pass on a few suggestions.

The book was the second volume of La Letteratura Latino by Professors Bassi and Cabrini, and published by the once well-known house of G. B. Paravia and Co. of Milan.

I make no attempt to pass judgement on the scholarship of these learned Italians; but the passages of wide range and high quality chosen to illustrate the prose and verse literature of the Silver and Post-classical periods not only serve their purpose admirably, but appear to me to afford a tolerably good anthology of Late Latin.

In Fifth and Sixth Forms the first consideration in the Classics course is no doubt success in public examinations, and any reading which the pupils may indulge in apart from the set books ought, I suppose, to be limited to the principal authors of the classical period. Yet I wonder if it would not be possible in the work of the Sixth, at all events in the year succeeding the School Certificate Examination, to vary the stereo-typed programme by introducing a little discursive reading, even if it be no more ambitious than the reading of selections.