Nor has it given us anything much better than the _Frogs_. That the polemic against Euripides, here and elsewhere, is unfairly [Sidenote: _The_ Frogs.] and excessively personal, is not to be denied; and even those who almost wholly agree with it from the literary side may grant that it admits, here and there, of an answer. But still as criticism it is both _magnifique_ and also _la guerre_. The critic is no desultory snarler, unprovided with theory, and simply snapping at the heels of some one he dislikes. His twenty years' campaign against the author of the _Medea_, from the _Acharnians_ to the _Frogs_ itself, is thoroughly consistent: it rests upon a reasoned view of art and taste as well as of politics and religion. He disapproves the sceptical purpose, the insidious sophistic, the morbid passion of his victim; but he disapproves quite as strongly the tedious preliminary explanations and interpolated narratives, the “precious” sentiment and style, the tricks and the trivialities. And let it be observed also that Aristophanes, fanatic as he is, and rightly is, on the Æschylean side, is far too good a critic and far too shrewd a man not to allow a pretty full view of the Æschylean defects, as well as to put in the mouth of Euripides himself a very fairly strong defence of his own merits. The famous debate between the two poets, with the accompanying observations of Dionysus and the Chorus, could be thrown, with the least possible difficulty, into the form of a critical _causerie_ which would anticipate by two thousand years and more the very shrewdest work of Dryden, the most thoughtful of Coleridge, the most delicate and ingenious of Arnold and Sainte-Beuve. It is indeed rather remarkable how easily literary criticism lends itself to the dramatic-poetical form, whether the ease be owing to the fact of this early and consummate example of it, or to some other cause. And what is especially noticeable is that, throughout, the censure goes documents in hand. The vague generalities of the _Poetics_ in verse, in which, after Horace and Vida, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries delighted, are here eschewed in favour of direct criticism of actual texts. One might call the _Frogs_, borrowing the phrase from mediæval French, a review _par personnages_, and a review of the closest, the most stringent, and the most effective. We can indeed only be surprised that with such an example as this, and others not far inferior, in the same dramatist if not in others, formal criticism in prose should have been so long in making its appearance, and when it appeared, should have shown so much less mastery of method. Beside Aristophanes, the pure critical reviewing of Aristotle himself is vague, is desultory, and begins at the wrong end; even that of Longinus is scrappy and lacking in grasp; while it would be as unfair as it would be unkind to mention, in any comparison of genius with the author of the _Frogs_, the one master