Plautus had no aristocratic patrons, like Ennius and Terence—probably his humour was too broad, and his taste not refined enough, to please the Scipios and Lælii, and their fastidious associates. Horace finds fault with Plautus because his wit was not sufficiently gentlemanlike, as well as his numbers not sufficiently harmonious. Probably the higher classes might have observed similar deficiencies; with the masses, however, the comedies of Plautus, notwithstanding their faults, retained their original popularity even in the Augustan age. The Roman public were his patrons. His very coarseness would recommend him to the rude admirers of the Fescennine songs and the Atellan _Fabulæ_. His careless prosody and inharmonious verses would either escape the not over-refined ears of his audience, or be forgiven for the sake of the fun which they contained. Life, bustle, surprise, unexpected situations, sharp, sprightly, brilliant, sparkling raillery, that knew no restraint nor bounds, carried the audience with him. He allowed no respite, no time for dulness or weariness. To use an expression of Horace, he hurried on from scene to scene, from incident to incident, from jest to jest, so that his auditors had no opportunity for feeling fatigue. Another cause of his popularity was, that although Greek was the fountain from which he drew his stores, and the metres of Greek poetry the framework in which he set them, his wit, his mode of thought, his language, were purely Roman. He had lived so long amongst Romans that he had caught their national spirit, and this spirit was reflected throughout his comedies. The incidents of them might have taken place in the streets of Rome, so skilful was he in investing them with a Roman dress. His style too was truly Latin, and Latin of the very purest and most elegant kind.[179] He did not, like Cato and Ennius, carry his admiration for Greek so far as to “enrich” his native tongue with new and foreign words. Nor would this feature be without some effect in gaining him the sympathy of the masses. They admire elegance of language if it is elegant simplicity. They appreciate well-chosen and well-arranged sentences, if the words are such as fall familiarly, and, therefore, intelligibly on their ears. The coarseness of Plautus, however, was the coarseness of innuendo, and even if the allusion was indelicate, it was veiled in decent language. This quality of his wit called forth the approbation of Cicero.[180] But it is difficult to conceive how he could compare him, in this particular, with the old Athenian comedy, the obscenity of which is so gross and palpable, as to constitute the sole blemish of those delightful compositions. The following laudatory epigram written by Varro is found in the Noctes Atticæ of A. Gellius:[181]— Postquam est mortem aptus Plautus, comœdia luget, Scena est deserta dein risus ludu, jocusque, Et numeri innumeri simul omnes collacrumarunt.