Titus Maccius Plautus, who flourished about the year 210 B.C., and Publius Terentius, a generation later, are more nearly allied to each other than are Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. It is only the special student of literature who need be concerned to elaborate the full distinction between them. Plautus has the more of broad and boisterous fun and drollery, Terence has the subtler humour and the more artistic style and architecture. But both alike borrow plots and even dialogue wholesale from those Greek comedians of whom Menander is a type. They both adapt Greek plays, just as English playwrights once adapted Molière, and recently adapted Sardou. The Latin adaptations, however, were of quite undisguised closeness, if not of positive servility. Whereas our playwrights seek to make their adaptations entirely English, Plautus and Terence did not seek to make theirs entirely Roman. It is true that their plots were based on real life, but it was a Greek life and not a Roman life. The scene was always in a Greek city. Imbecile fathers duped by spendthrift sons, jealous husbands outwitted and stultified, cunning and unscrupulous slaves playing the part of _dei ex machina_, armies of cooks, confidantes and nondescripts—these things, which appear monotonously, are not really Roman. Those who read the earlier plays of Molière generally grow somewhat weary of the clever _valets_, the Mascarilles, of the dupes, of the Sganarelles, and of the conventional tricks upon parents and husbands. The truth is that Molière, at this stage of his career, in imitating or adapting Plautus and Terence, was almost as far from the real life of Paris in his own day as Plautus and Terence were from the real life of Rome. _Les Fourberies de Scapin_ is as distinct and as unconvincing an adaptation of the _Phormio_ of Terence as Shakespeare’s early _Comedy of Errors_ is of Plautus’s _Menaechmi_. Now it is a noteworthy fact, as illustrating how doubly exotic a thing Latin literature was, that neither Plautus nor Terence was a true-born Roman. Plautus was a countryman of Umbria, Terence was an African of Carthage. Yet it was these two who remained the only considerable writers of Latin comedy, and the whole of their work was adaptation, free translation, or guileless plagiarism. To our subject these writers are of no small account, in virtue of the fact that they were the progenitors of Italian comedy, thence of Molière, and, from Molière, of our own comic stage of the seventeenth, and the earlier and greater part of the eighteenth, century, the ages of Congreve and Farquhar, and of Fielding and Sheridan.