public trust, and brings the entertainment to a close with the discomfiture of the Ring and the relief of the taxpayers. Demos is said to have been the prototype of "John Bull," the personification of the Englishman, as he was first exhibited by Dr. Arbuthnot in the early part of the eighteenth century, and _The Knights_ is regarded as "an historical piece of great value, because it furnishes a faithful picture of the nation and of its customs." What curious ideas of American life and manners will posterity gather from _Adonis_ and _Evangeline_! Classical critics credit Aristophanes with being distinguished for the exuberance of his wit, for his inexhaustible fund of comic humor, and for the Attic purity and great simplicity of his language; while at the same time he is accused of introducing, when it suits his purpose, every variety of dialect, of coining new words and expressions as occasion offers, and of making bad puns, whether occasion offers or not; in all of which his disciples persistently and consistently follow him. Samuel Foote, who lived in an age of epithets, was called "The British Aristophanes." He respected no person and no thing. He satirized every subject, sacred or profane, which struck his fancy, from Chesterfield's Letters to the Stratford Jubilee; and he caricatured everybody, from Whitfield to the Duchess of Kingston. His serious attempt at Othello, in the beginning of his career as an actor, was considered a master-piece of unconscious burlesque, only inferior, in its extravagance and nonsense, to his Hamlet, and he failed in every legitimate part he undertook to play. As a mimic, however, in dramatic productions of his own writing, he met with immense success; and as a writer of stage burlesque he ranks very high. He made Italian opera ridiculous in his _Cat Concert_; he gave serious offence to a hard-working, respectable trade in _The Tailors, a Tragedy for Warm Weather_; he attacked the medical profession in _The Devil on Two Sticks_; he parodied sentimental romance of the _Pamela_ school in his _Piety in Pattens_; and he offended all right-thinking persons, heterodox as well as orthodox, in _The Minor_, a travesty upon the methods of Wesley and his Church.