Hipponax, of Ephesus, who lived in the latter half of the sixth century before Christ, is credited with having been "The Father of Burlesque Poetry." He was small and ill-favored physically, and his natural personal defects were the indirect cause of the development of his satirical powers and of his posthumous fame. Two sculptors of Chios caricatured him grossly in a statue publicly exhibited, and he, in return, fired his muse with the torch of hatred, and burned them in effigy with terrible but clever ridicule. He parodied the _Iliad_, in which he made Achilles an Ionian glutton; he did not spare his own parents; he poked fun at the gods themselves; he impaled Mrs. Hipponax with a couplet upon which she is still exhibited to the scoffers, and he is only to be distinguished from his long line of successors by the curious fact that he does not seem to have spoken with derision of his mother-in-law! His tribute to matrimony is still preserved in choice iambics, roughly translated as follows: "There are but two happy days in the life of a married man--the day of his marriage, and the day of the burial of his wife." From this it will be seen that twenty-five centuries or more look down upon the Benedict of the modern burlesque, who leaves his wife at home when he travels for pleasure! Aristophanes, the comic poet of Athens, who wrote fifty-four comedies between the years 427 and 388 B.C., may be termed "The Father of the Burlesque Play." He satirized people more than things, or than other men's tragedies, and to his school belong Brougham's _Pocahontas_ and _Columbus_, rather than the same author's _Dan Keyser de Bassoon_, or _Much Ado About a Merchant of Venice_. The plots of Aristophanes are as original as his wit. In _The Wasps_ he caricatured the fondness of the Athenians for litigation; in _The Birds_ his object was to convince the Athenians of the advantages of a clean political sweep; in _The Female Orators_ he satirized the Sorosis and the women suffragists of his time; in _The Feast of Ceres_ he pointed out how useful and ornamental woman is in her own sphere; and in _Peace_, written to urge the close of the Peloponnesian war, he reached the sublimity of burlesque in creating a stage heroine who never utters a word. The argument of _The Knights_ will give a very fair idea of the plots of his plays. Athens is represented as a private house, whose master, Demos (the people), has more servants and more servants' relations than he can comfortably wait upon or decently support. Nicias and Demosthenes are his slaves, and Cleon, a political boss of the period, is his butler and confidential valet. Demos is irritable, superstitious, inconstant in his pursuits, and dull in character. Agoracritus, a sausage-seller, subverts the plots and the plans of the demagogue Cleon--originally played by Aristophanes himself--shows the householder that his favorite servant is utterly unworthy of the