the last by a reconciliation of the powers of heaven and hell, and the pardon of the last offender in the person of Orestes. To sketch, however, the plan of the other dramas of the trilogy would be to trespass too far upon our space and time. It is enough to have illustrated, by the example of the "Agamemnon," the general character of a Greek tragedy; and those who care to pursue the subject further must be referred to the text of the plays themselves. Section 7. Comedy. Even more remarkable than the tragedy of the Greeks, in its rendering of a didactic intention under the forms of a free and spontaneous art, is the older comedy known to us through the works of Aristophanes. As the former dealt with the general conceptions, religious and ethical, that underlay the Greek view of life, using as its medium of exposition the ancient national myths, so the latter dealt with the particular phases of contemporary life, employing the machinery of a free burlesque. The achievement of Aristophanes, in fact, is more astonishing, in a sense, than that of Aeschylus. Starting with what is always, _prima facie_, the prose of everyday life, its acrid controversies, its vulgar and tedious types, and even its particular individuals--for Aristophanes does not hesitate to introduce his contemporaries in person on the stage--he fits to this gross and heavy stuff the wings of imagination, scatters from it the clinging mists of banality and spite and speeds it forth through the lucid heaven of art amid peals of musical laughter and snatches of lyric song. For Aristophanes was a poet as well as a comedian, and his genius is displayed not only in the construction of his fantastic plots, not only in the inexhaustible profusion of his humane and genial wit, but in bursts of pure poetry as melodious and inspired as ever sprang from the lips of the lyrists of Greece or of the world. The basis of the comic as of the tragic art of the Greeks was song and dance; and the chorus, the original element of the play, still retains in the works of Aristophanes a place important enough to make it clear that in comedy, too, a prominent aspect of the art must have been the aesthetic appeal to the ear and the eye. In general structure, in fact, comedy and tragedy were alike; aesthetically the motives were similar, only they were set in a different key. But while primarily Aristophanes, like the tragedians, was a great artist, he was also, like them, a great interpreter of life. His dramas are satires as well as poems, and he was and expressed himself supremely conscious of having a "mission" to fulfil. "He has scorned from the first," he makes the chorus sing of himself in the "Peace":