I find it much more difficult to speak of Athenian Comedy with candour and discrimination. Scholars of unblemished reputation and unimpeachable sense of humour do unquestionably find the plays of Aristophanes, even when produced by English schoolboys on speech-day, excessively diverting. There is, it is true, in Aristophanes a good deal of simple honest fun of the type represented by Mr. Punch or Mr. Pickwick and his spectacles in the wheelbarrow. When the wrong man gets a thwacking or when an ignorant amateur told to sit _to_ the oar proceeds to sit _on_ it, it is, I suppose, no less funny in the twentieth century _anno Domini_ than it was in the fifth century before Christ. But there I must leave the humour of Aristophanes to those who can appreciate it and still laugh even when they have laboriously picked out the point of the joke from the notes at the end of their text-book. Most of the humour is of this type. It was written to burlesque the well-known figures of the day, and no doubt served its purpose extremely well. Indeed, there is no more certain proof of the liberty of speech which prevailed in Athens than the fact that Aristophanes was permitted to represent Cleon the Prime Minister in successive plays in the most ludicrous and offensive situations. The Old Comedy of Athens rested largely upon a basis of venomous personal slander and libel without self-restraint, without even common decency. It must be added that all ancient humour was corrupted at the source with obscenity. Anthropology, no doubt, explains this satisfactorily for the anthropologist. Comedy took its rise from obscene representations of the power of fecundity. Women and children were properly forbidden to be present at comic representations. It is not only thus with literature; the comic vase-paintings of Athens and the comic frescoes of Pompeii are not suitable to modern taste. Aristophanes as a poet is in a very different category. Every now and then in a parabasis he turns to talk to his audience, so to speak, in his own person, dropping for the moment into serious vein. In such passages he is often superb. In the following dialogue from “The Frogs” we have an interesting and characteristic piece of literary criticism. Aristophanes is, as we have seen, a Tory. The Athenian he loves is remarkably like the John Bull of our national ideal. Here Æschylus as the poet of the old order is at issue with Euripides, and Dionysus himself is there to umpire, disguised as an irrelevant Philistine. The spirited and very free translation is by Hookham Frere. Euripides has already expounded his principles, and Æschylus now takes his turn. ÆSCHYLUS