asks which is the one for the condemning votes. The son shows him the wrong one, and into that he drops his vote. He has acquitted the dog by mistake, and faints away when he finds out what he has done--he has never given a vote for acquittal before in his life, and cannot forgive himself. And with this double stroke at the bitter spirit of an Athenian jury and at the ballot-box, the action of the comedy, according to our notions of dramatic fitness, might very properly end. So strongly does one of the ablest English writers upon Aristophanes, Mr Mitchell, feel this, that in his translation he here divides the comedy, and places the remaining portion in a sequel, to which he gives the title of “The Dicast turned Gentleman.” Philocleon has been persuaded by his son to renounce his old habits of life, and to become more fashionable in his dress and conversation; but the new pursuits to which he betakes himself are scarcely so respectable as his old ones. His son, after a few lessons on modern conversation and deportment, takes him out to a dinner-party, where he insults the guests, beats the servants, and from which he returns in the last scene very far from sober, and not in the best possible company. He is followed by some half-dozen complainants, male and female, whom he has cudgelled in the streets on his way home; and when they threaten to “take the law” of him, he laughs uproariously at the old-fashioned notion. Law-courts, he assures them, are quite obsolete. In vain his son remonstrates with him upon his outrageous proceedings; he bids the “old lawyer,” as he calls him, get out of his way. So that we have here the counterpart to the conclusion of ‘The Clouds:’ as, in the former play, young Pheidippides gives up the turf, at his father’s request, only to become a word-splitting philosopher and an undutiful son; so here the father is weaned from the law-courts, and persuaded to mix in more refined society, only to turn out a “grey iniquity” like Falstaff. The moral, if there be one, is somewhat hard to find. It may possibly be contained in a few words of the Chorus, which speak of the difficulty and the danger of a sudden change in all the habits of a man’s life. Or is it necessary always for the writer of burlesques, any more than for the poet, to supply his audience with any moral at all? Might it not be quite enough to have raised a laugh at the absurd termination of the son’s attempt to reform the father, and the tendency of all new converts to run into extremes? CHAPTER VI. THE BIRDS.