The patriotism of Aristophanes was honest, bold, and generally wise. He was still below the age at which the law permitted a poet to contend for a dramatic prize, and was therefore compelled to use a borrowed name, when, in the year after the death of Pericles, he produced his first work, in which his chief aim seems to have been to exhibit the contrast between the ancient and the modern manners. In his next, his ridicule was pointed more at the defects or the perversion of political institutions, and perhaps at the democratical system of filling public offices by lot. In both, however, he had probably assailed many of the most conspicuous persons of the day, and either by personal satire, or by attacks on the abuses by which the demagogues throve, he provoked the hostility of Cleon, who endeavoured to crush him by a prosecution. Its nominal ground was, it seems, the allegation, that the poet, who in fact according to some accounts was of Dorian origin, was not legally entitled to the franchise. But the real charge was that in his recent comedy he had exposed the Athenian magistracy to the derision of the foreign spectators. Cleon, however, was baffled; and though the attempt was once or twice renewed, perhaps by other enemies of Aristophanes, it failed so entirely, that he seems to have been soon left in the unmolested enjoyment of public favour; and he not only was encouraged to revenge himself on Cleon by a new piece, in which the demagogue was exhibited in person, and was represented by the poet himself,--who it is said could not find an actor to undertake the part, nor even get a suitable mask made for it,--but he at the same time ventured on an experiment which it seems had never been tried before on the comic stage. [Illustration: ARISTOPHANES]