But the chief attraction of Aristophanes is the abounding comic force and _verve_ of his style. It resembles an impetuous torrent, whose swift rush purifies in its flow the grossness and obscenity inseparable from the origin of comedy, and buoys up and sweeps along on the current of fancy and improvisation the chaff and dross of vulgar jests, puns, scurrilous personalities, and cheap "gags," allowing no time for chilling reflections or criticism. Jests which are singly feeble combine to induce a mood of extravagant hilarity when huddled upon us with such "impossible conveyance." This _vivida vis animi_ can hardly be reproduced in a translation, and disappears altogether in an attempt at an abstract enumeration of the poet's inexhaustible devices for comic effect. He himself repeatedly boasts of the fertility of his invention, and claims to have discarded the coarse farce of his predecessors for something more worthy of the refined intelligence of his clever audience. Yet it must be acknowledged that much even of his wit is the mere filth-throwing of a naughty boy; or at best the underbred jocularity of the "funny column," the topical song, or the minstrel show. There are puns on the names of notable personages; a grotesque, fantastic, punning fauna, flora, and geography of Greece; a constant succession of surprises effected by the sudden substitution of low or incongruous terms in proverbs, quotations, and legal or religious formulas; scenes in dialect, scenes of excellent fooling in the vein of Uncle Toby and the Clown, girds at the audience, personalities that for us have lost their point,--about Cleonymus the caster-away of shields, or Euripides's herb-selling mother,--and everywhere unstinted service to the great gods Priapus and Cloacina. A finer instrument of comic effect is the parody. The countless parodies of the lyric and dramatic literature of Greece are perhaps the most remarkable testimony extant to the intelligence of an Athenian audience. Did they infallibly catch the allusion when Dicæopolis welcomed back to the Athenian fish-market the long-lost Copaic eel in high Æschylean strain,-- "Of fifty nymphs Copaic alderliefest queen," and then, his voice breaking with the intolerable pathos of Admetus's farewell to the dying Alcestis, added, "Yea, even in death Thou'lt bide with me, embalmed and beet-bestewed"?