regarded as a sort of fantasia on self-indulgence and self-control. The summer retreat of 1874 was found once more on the familiar north coast of France,--this time at the quiet hamlet of Mers, near Treport. In this lonely place, with scarcely a book at hand, he wrote the greater part of the most prodigally and exuberantly learned of all his poems--_Aristophanes' Apology_ (published April 1875). It was not Browning's way to repeat his characters, but the story of Balaustion, the brilliant girl devotee of Euripides, had proved an admirable setting for his interpretations of Greek drama; and the charm of that earlier "most delightful of May-month amusements" was perhaps not the less easily revived in these weeks of constant companionship with a devoted woman-friend of his own. Balaustion is herself full ten years older than at the time of her first adventure; her fresh girlish enthusiasm has ripened into the ardent conviction of intellectual maturity; she can not only cite Euripides, but vindicate his art against his mightiest assailant. Situation, scenery, language, are here all more complex. The first Adventure was almost Greek in its radiant and moving simplicity; the last is Titanically Browningesque, a riot of the least Hellenic elements of Browning's mind with the uptorn fragments of the Hellenic world. Moreover, the issue is far from being equally clear. The glory of Euripides is still the ostensible theme; but Aristophanes had so many points of contact with Browning himself, and appeals in his defence to so many root-ideas of Browning's own, that the reader hesitates between the poet to whom Browning's imagination allied him, and the poet whom his taste preferred. His Aristophanes is, like himself, the poetry of "Life," a broad and generous realist, who like Lippo Lippi draws all existence into his art; an enemy of all asceticisms and abstractions, who drives his meaning home through vivid concrete example and drastic phrase, rather than by enunciating the impressive moral commonplaces of tragic poetry.[59] Aristophanes, too, had been abused for his "unintelligible" poetry,--"mere psychologic puzzling,"[60]--by a "chattering" public which preferred the lilt of nursery rhymes. The magnificent portrait of Aristophanes is conceived in the very spirit of the riotous exuberance of intellect and senses-- "Mind a-wantoning At ease of undisputed mastery Over the body's brood"-- which was so congenial to the realist in Browning; "the clear baldness--all his head one brow"--and the surging flame of red from cheek to temple; the huge eyeballs rolling back native fire, imperiously triumphant, the "pursed mouth's pout aggressive," and "the beak supreme above," "beard whitening under like a vinous foam." [Footnote 59: _Arist. Ap._, p. 698.] [Footnote 60: Ib., p. 688.]