The stage method adopted by the burlesque writers of our time is strikingly similar to that followed by Aristophanes. Scenes of dialogue and scenic display are alternated in both. In the modern burlesque, the front scenes are enlivened by broad comic duets and nigger dances. Then the “flats” are drawn off, and we have an elaborate “set”—a castle, a mountain pass, or a picturesque sea-shore, where the ballet takes the place of the Greek chorus. Thus, in the _Frogs_, we have a front scene of broad comic business between Bacchus and Xanthias, and then a grand full stage “set” of the Acherusian lake, with Charon coming alongside in his boat. Lastly, we have what the modern playbill calls a “grand transformation scene,” in the infernal regions, where blue-fire would have come in very appropriately, had it been then invented. Although the Greeks, probably, did not use scenes, but dropped the curtain between the divisions of their plays, yet some of the burlesques of Aristophanes will be found to be well adapted to the modern method. Substituting an æsthetical critic for Bacchus, and Shakspeare and Ben Jonson, or Samuel Johnson and John Dryden, for Æschylus and Euripides, very good fun might be got out of a version of the _Frogs_ at the Olympic or the Strand. It might be a question, however, if the gods would understand it. Still, if the æsthetical critic had a comic servant, and said and did such things as Bacchus says and does, he could not fail to make them laugh. We have said that it is but one step from Aristophanes to the burlesque writers of the present time. That is, as near as possible, the truth. The Romans had no burlesque drama, in the Aristophanic sense. Their most extravagant comedies never dealt with real personages; but aimed at representing life and manners, and teaching morals by means of a dramatic fable, which was exemplary, and not didactic. They were comedies of real life, in the truest sense of the word; the puns and witticisms in which, though sometimes rather coarse and broad, as in Plautus, never bordered upon the outrageous and the extravagant. In the search for specimens of burlesque dramatic literature of the kind we are now considering, we may hop almost from Aristophanes to Gay, from the _Æolosicon_ to the _Beggar’s Opera_. As Aristophanes claimed, in the _Frogs_, to have the purpose of ridiculing the bad tragedies of the time, so Gay professed, in his _Beggar’s Opera_, to declare war against the Italian opera, which, at that time, was asserting its sway over the public taste, to the serious damage of the legitimate drama. Witnessing the _Beggar’s Opera_, as it is performed in our day, we can readily understand its great popularity on its first production. Its songs are enough to account for that. But it is certainly not easy to understand how it came to be regarded as a telling and pungent burlesque upon Italian opera. It does not turn the laugh against opera, in the shape it now assumes. When Macheath sings