In Aristophanes you have the convincing hurly-burly, the sweating, mean, talented, scrambling, laughing life of the Mediterranean--that same life of which you find records in the recent Cretan discoveries, dating from 2500 B. C., or which you may observe in the market-places of Naples to-day. Plato’s dialogues do not give this life. They give a picture of something that never existed, something that sounds like an enchanted picture, a picture of life as it ought to be for the leisure classes, but as it never has been and never can be while the world lasts, even for them. The ideas which we carry in our minds criticize each other, despite all we can do to keep them apart. They attack and mutilate each other, like the monsters in a drop of muddy water, or the soldiers of Cadmus when the stone of controversy was thrown among them. It is as hard to preserve the _entente cordiale_ between hostile thoughts as between hostile bull-dogs. We have no sooner patted the head of the courtly and affable Socrates given to us by Plato--the perfect scholar and sweet gentleman--than the vulgarian Socrates given to us by Aristophanes--the frowzy all-nighter, the notorious enemy to bathing--flies at the throat of Plato’s darling and leaves him rumpled. So far as manners and customs go, nothing can rival good comic description: it supersedes everything else. You can neither write nor preach it down, nor put it down by law. Hogarth has depicted the England of the early Georges in such a way as to convince us. No mortal vehicle of expression can upset Hogarth. When we come to pictures of life which belong to a more serious species--to poetry, to history, to religion--we find the same conflicts going on in our minds: one source criticizes another. One belief eats up the next belief as the acid eats the plate. It is not merely the outside of Socrates that Aristophanes has demolished. He has a little damaged the philosophy of Socrates. He undermines Greek thought: he helps and urges us not to take it seriously. He thus becomes an ally of the whole world of later Christian thought. If I were to go to Athens to-morrow, the first man I would seek out would be Aristophanes. He is a modern: he is a man.