Excerpt from A New Classical Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Mythology and Geography: Partly Based Upon the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology

After the completion of the second of these works, Dr. W. Smith and his brother, the Rev. Philip Smith, from that work, from Pauly'a encyclopadie, and other works, drew up a Classical Dictionary for Schools (of Greek and Roman Biography, Mythology, and Geography), which should by its size and price be accessible to all students, and present in a brief and convenient form the latest and most reliable results in these departments. The plan and detail of the work are stated at length in the preface of the English editor, subjoined to this, on p. Xiii. Xv., to which the reader is referred. When the printing of this work commenced, the publishers of the American edition immediately made an arrangement with the English publishers, and purchased at a considerable cost the sheets in advance, to be revised and edited for circulation in this country; and the two books were to appear nearly simultaneously. The present work is the revised edition of the English one, and will be found, the editor believes, greatly improved, as well as much more complete. It is not, however designed to, and, in the editor's opinion, will not supersede his own Classical Dictionary published in 1841, since the articles are purposely brief, and results only are stated, without that fullness of detail which is desirable to the more advanced scholar and the educated man of leisure; but it is intended for the use of those whose means will not allow a more expensive, or their scanty time the use of a more copious work; in other words, it is meant to take the place, by reason of its convenient size and low price, of Lempriere's old dictionary, which, with all its absurd errors and defects, still has a lingering existence in certain parts of our country on account of its cheapness. On this head the English editor speaks strongly; in point of literary or scientific value, Lempriere's dictionary is dead requiescat in pace - and to put it into a boy's hands now as a guide in classical matters would be as wise and as useful as giving him some mystic treatise of the Middle Ages on alchemy to serve as a text book in chemistry. The present work contains all the names of any value to a schoolboy occurring in Lempriere, and a great many not in that work, while the information is derived from the fountain-head, and not from the diluted stream cf French encyclopedias.

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