In the preliminary discourse to his translation of the Comedies of Aristophanes, MR. THOMAS MITCHELL, an English critic of note, makes these observations upon the character of the Old Comedy: "The Old Comedy, as it is called, in contradistinction to what was afterward named the Middle and the New, stood in the extreme relation of contrariety and parody to the tragedy of the Greeks --it was directed chiefly to the lower orders of society at Athens; it served in some measure the purposes of the modern journal, in which public measures and the topics of the day might be fully discussed; and in consequence the dramatis personæ were generally the poet's own contemporaries, speaking in their own names and acting in masks, which, as they bore only a caricature resemblance of their own faces, showed that the poet, in his observations, did not mean to be taken literally. Like tragedy, comedy constituted part of a religious ceremony; and the character of the deity to whom it was more particularly dedicated was stamped at times pretty visibly upon the work which was composed in his honor. The Dionysian festivals were the great carnivals of antiquity--they celebrated the returns of vernal festivity or the joyous vintage, and were in consequence the great holidays of Athens--the seasons of universal relaxation. "The comic poet was the high-priest of the festival; and if the orgies of his divinity (the god of wine) sometimes demanded a style of poetry which a Father of our Church probably had in his eye when he called all poetry the devil's wine, the organ of their utterance (however strange it may seem to us) no doubt considered himself as perfectly absolved from the censure which we should bestow on such productions: in his compositions he was discharging the same pious office as the painter, whose duty it was to fill the temples of the same deity with pictures which our imaginations would consider equally ill-suited to the habitations of divinity. What religion therefore forbids among us, the religion of the Greeks did not merely tolerate but enjoin. Nor was the extreme and even profane gayety of the comedy without its excuse. To unite extravagant mirth with a solemn seriousness was enjoined by law, even in the sacred festival of Ceres.