During the last twenty or thirty years evidence has been rapidly accumulating to prove that the codex was in general use for books at a much earlier time than was formerly supposed. The definite testimony of Martial and others on the subject could be misinterpreted, discounted, or overlooked so long as there was no clear corroborating archaeological evidence. Papyrus and the roll had taken firm hold upon the classicistic imaginations of modern students of ancient literatures, especially after the nineteenth-century discoveries of papyri in Egypt, and no one dreamed that the New Testament documents could have been written originally on anything but papyrus sheets and papyrus rolls.

It is now nearly forty years ago that two scholars independently drew attention to Ambrosiaster's attacks on the paganism of his age. Cumont in a brilliant article, La polémique de l'Ambrosiaster contre les paiens, analyzed and discussed Quaestio CXIIII, Adversus paganos, and Quaestio CXV, De fato, of the writer whose identity must still be regarded as uncertain. The purpose of Souter's admirable monograph, A study of Ambrosiaster, was quite different. Primarily he was concerned to prove once and for all that the pseudo-Augustinian Quaestiones veteris et novi testamenti CXXVII were composed by the same author as the highly individual commentary on the thirteen epistles of St. Paul included among the works of Ambrose. The common authorship of the two works is now universally accepted. Souter's book was also a preliminary study for his definitive edition of the Quaestiones which appeared some years later in the Vienna Corpus.

The town of Northampton was settled in 1654, by pioneers coming up the valley from Connecticut. The physical tasks of the first years kept them from forming a church, but in 1659 they called Eleazar Mather to be their parson, who came with his bride Esther, daughter of the Reverend John Warham of Windsor. Mathers were either long or very short lived; Eleazar died on July 24, 1669, leaving Esther a widow of twenty-five, with three children and an estate of £524, of which £60 were in books, and Northampton went in search of a new pastor. In the forthright New England of the seventeenth century there was a method in such situations so frequently observed that it might almost be called a custom. When a minister died, after a town had invested in him to the extent of land and a house, and the widow was of marriageable age, they summoned a young bachelor to the pulpit. A few months after Eleazar's death, Solomon Stoddard, eight years out of Harvard, came by invitation to exhibit a sample of his preaching; on March 18, 1670, he married Esther Mather. She bore him twelve children and in her old age, though very “lame of the Sciatica,” she still was spinning “at the Linen-wheel”; she outlived her husband by seven years and died in 1736 at the age of ninety-two.

The article in the April, 1941 number of the REVIEW on The Epitaph of Julius Terentius by C. B. Welles, and the following Postscript by A. D. Nock, are of great interest for their presentation of Graeco-Roman thought on the state of departed souls. The writer would note some scanty correspondences from the Oriental field.