"Good Genius! Glory of the poet, glow O' the humorist who castigates his kind, Suave summer-lightning lambency which plays On stag-horned tree, misshapen crag askew, Then vanishes with unvindictive smile After a moment's laying black earth bare. Splendor of wit that springs a thunder ball-- Satire--to burn and purify the world, True aim, fair purpose: just wit justly strikes Injustice,--right, as rightly quells the wrong, Finds out in knaves', fools', cowards', armory The tricky tinselled place fire flashes through. No damage else, sagacious of true ore; Wit learned in the laurel, leaves each wreath O'er lyric shell or tragic barbiton,-- Though alien gauds be singed,--undesecrate." Her attitude here is very like that of criticism in general, except that she is more or less sarcastic, meaning to imply that such Aristophanes might be but is not. Symonds, on the other hand, thinks him really what Balaustion thinks he might be. "If," he says, "Coleridge was justified in claiming the German word Lustspiel for the so-called comedies of Shakespeare, we have a far greater right to appropriate this wide and pregnant title to the plays of Aristophanes. The brazen mask which crowns his theatre smiles indeed broadly, serenely, as if its mirth embraced the universe; but its hollow eye-sockets suggest infinite possibilities of profoundest irony. Buffoonery carried to the point of paradox, wisdom disguised as insanity, and gaiety concealing the whole sum of human disappointment, sorrow and disgust, seem ready to escape from its open but rigid lips, which are molded to a proud perpetual laughter. It is a laughter which spares neither God nor man--which climbs Olympus only to drag down the immortals to its scorn, and trails the pall of august humanity in the mire; but which, amid its mockery and blasphemy, seems everlastingly asserting, as by paradox, that reverence of the soul which bends our knees to heaven and makes us respect our brothers." One cannot help feeling, in view of these very diverse opinions, that both are exaggerated. The enthusiasm of Symonds seems almost fanatic. Though no one of penetration can fail to see the wit and wisdom, and at times, in such lyrics as those in "The Clouds," the poetic charm of Aristophanes, the person of fastidious taste, whether a Greek girl of his own day, or a man of these latter days, must sometimes feel that his buffoonery oversteps the bounds of true wit, even when it is not shadowed by a coarseness not to be borne at the present day. When Balaustion asks him "in plain words," "Have you exchanged brute blows, which teach the brute Man may surpass him in brutality,-- For human fighting, or true god-like force Which breeds persuasion nor needs fight at all?"