But any such general rules must be taken with their exceptions. As there is a risk of reading modern sentiment into ancient work, and even of fixing on the startling modernisms that occur in Greek poetry,[11] and dwelling on them till they assume an exaggerated importance, so there is a risk perhaps as great of slurring over the inmost quality, the poetry of the poetry, where it has that touch of romance or magic that sets it beyond all our generalisations. The magical charm is just what cannot be brought under any rules; it is the result less of art than of instinct, and is almost independent of time and place. The lament of the swallow in an Alexandrian poet[12] touches the same note of beauty and longing that Keats drew from the song of the nightingale; the couplet of Satyrus, where echo repeats the lonely cry of the birds,[13] is, however different in tone, as purely romantic as the opening lines of /Christabel/. ---------- [1] Anth. Pal. ix. 823. [2] App. Plan. 230, 227; Anth. Pal. ix. 71. [3] vi. 28 in this selection. [4] Anth. Pal. ix. 667. [5] Ibid. ix. 333. [6] Ibid. ix. 314. [7] Aegeus, fr. 24; cf. the celebrated simile in /Hyperion/, beginning, /As when upon a tranced summer night/. [8] Anth. Pal. xii. 138. [9] Ibid. ix. 373, 87. [10] Ibid. vii. 717. [11] A curious instance is in an epigram by Mnasalcas (Anth. Pal. vii. 194), where he speaks of the evening hymn ({panesperon umnon}) of the grasshopper. This, it must be remembered, was written in the third century B.C. [12] Pamphilus in Anth. Pal. ix. 57. [13] App. Plan. 153. XII Though fate and death make a dark background against which the brilliant colouring of Greek life glitters out with heightened magnificence, the comedy of men and manners occupies an important part of their literature, and Aristophanes and Menander are as intimately Greek as Sophocles. It is needless to speak of what we gain in our knowledge of Greece from the preserved comedies of Aristophanes; and if we follow the best ancient criticism, we must conclude that in Menander we have lost a treasury of Greek life that cannot be replaced. Quintilian, speaking at a distance from any national or contemporary prejudice, uses terms of him such as we should not think unworthy of Shakespeare.[1] These Attic comedians were the field out of which epigrammatists, from that time down to the final decay of literature, drew some of their graver and very many of their lighter epigrams. Of the convivial epigrams in the Anthology a number are imitated from extant fragments of the New Comedy; one at least[2] transfers a line of Menander's unaltered; and short fragments of both Menander and Diphilus are included in the Anthology as though not materially differing from epigrams themselves.[3]