Perhaps it was owing to some defect in their civil polity that the ancients were comparatively so easily put down by the Roman power, which might have been the superior civilisation.  Possibly the great majority of the people may have been dissatisfied with their rulers, and gladly removed to another place and another form of government.  It is even possible, and indeed likely, that these great public works may have been carried on by the forced labour of the poorest and, consequently, the most numerous class of the population, and that, consequently, they had no particular tie to their native city, as being only a hardship to them; and they may even have had a dislike to sewers in themselves, as reminding them of their bondage, and which dislike their descendants have inherited, and for which they are now suffering.  At any rate, it is an instructive example to our present citizens of the value of drainage and sanitary arrangements, and shows that the importance of these things was recognised and appreciated in the earliest times.

C.P.F.

* * * * *

ANDREW FRUSIUS—­ANDRE DES FREUX.

Many of your readers, as well as “ROTERODAMUS,” will be ready to acknowledge their obligation to Mr. Bruce for his prompt identification of the author of the epigram against Erasmus (pp. 27, 28.).  I have just referred to the catalogue of the library of this university, and I regret to say that we have no copy of any of the works of Frusius.  Mr. Bruce says he knows nothing of Frusius as an author.  I believe there is no mention of him in any English bibliographical or biographical work.  There is, however, a notice {181} of him in the Biographie Universelle, vol. xvi. (Paris), and in the Biografia Universale, vol. xxi. (Venezia).  As these works have, perhaps, found their way into very few private English libraries, I send you the following sketch, which will probably be acceptable to your readers.  It is much to be lamented that sufficient encouragement cannot be given in this country for the production of a Universal Biography.  Roses’s work, which promised to be a giant, dwindled down to a miserable pigmy; and that under “The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge” was strangled in its birth.

Andre des Freux, better known by his Latin name, Frusius, was born at Chartres, in the beginning of the sixteenth century.  He embraced the life of an ecclesiastic, and obtained the cure of Thiverval, which he held many years with great credit to himself.  The high reputation of Ignatius Loyola, who was then at Rome, with authority from the Holy See to found the Society of the Jesuits, led Frusius to that city, where he was admitted a member of the new order in 1541, and shortly after became secretary to Loyola.  He contributed to the establishment of the Society at Parma, Venice, and many towns of Italy and Sicily.  He was the