The ingenious French editor, mentioned in Note 72, has given the following elegant and delicate turn to this objectionable passage. “C. Byrrhia, Quid tibi videtur? Adeon’ ad eum? B. Quidni? ut, si nihil impetres, _Te sibi cavendum credat, si illam duxerit_.” NOTE 113. _You see me to-day for the last time._ Though Charinus means, that the misery of losing Philumena would cost him his life, as he expressly tells Davus in the next scene, yet he only insinuates this by saying, You will never see me again: and avoids the mention of _death_: which was considered among the Greeks as a word that should scarcely ever be named: and it was reckoned the height of ill breeding to discourse in company respecting human mortality; which was a subject to be spoken of only by distant hints: (_vide Note 190_.) This whole scene is admirably written; and as well as the last scene in the first act, is a specimen of Terence’s powers in the pathetic. Some very ingenious remarks on this scene are to be found in Donatus, and in the Miscellanies of Nonnius. NOTE 114. _Now, if either you, or Byrrhia here, can do any thing; in Heavens name, do it; contrive, invent, and manage, if you can, that she may be given to you._ It does not appear that Charinus and Byrrhia set any stratagem on foot, in compliance with the wishes of Pamphilus, to break off the treaty between Simo and Chremes; indeed, they are rather inactive throughout the play, and the under-plot proceeds separately from the principal plot: this, I attribute to Terence’s close imitation of Menander, in what respects Pamphilus’s intrigue, as the characters of Charinus and Byrrhia were added by Terence: Menander’s play being written with a single plot; which was doubled by our author, in compliance with the taste of his age. It is supposed that Terence’s reputation for art was gained chiefly by his success in combining two intrigues in one play: a mode of dramatic writing which the Romans in those times considered a great novelty. The Stepmother is the only play written by Terence, in which the plot is single, and though critics in general argue with Volcatius, “Sumetur _Hecyra sexta_ ex his fabula,”