We are less able to speak of his originality in the selection of incidents and dramatic situations, in the general management of his plots, and his conception of characters. Though more varied than Terence in the subjects which he chooses for dramatic treatment, yet there is great sameness, both of incident, development, and character, in many of them. His favourite subject is a scheme by which a slave, in the interests of his young master, and his mistress, cheats a father, a mercenary captain, or a 'leno,' who are treated, though in different degrees, as enemies of the human race and legitimate objects of spoliation. Some of the best of his plays--the Pseudolus, Bacchides, the Mostellaria, and the Miles Gloriosus--turn entirely upon incidents of this kind,--'frustrationes in comoediis' as they are called. There is nothing on which the chief agent in such plots prides himself so much as on his success 'in shearing,' 'planing away,' or 'wiping the nose' of, his antagonist in the game: there is no indignity about which the sense of honour is so sensitive as that of having had 'words palmed off upon one,' and having thus been made an object of ridicule. The invariable enlisting of sympathy in favour of the cheat and against the dupe is a trait more illustrative of the countrymen of Ulysses than of Fabricius: but the 'Tusci turba impia vici' at Rome had, no doubt, their own native aptitude for cheating and lying. The 'Pseudolus' is perhaps the best and the most typical specimen of a play the interest of which turns on this kind of intrigue. In it the plot is skilfully worked out, the characters are conceived with the greatest liveliness, and admirably sustained and contrasted, and the incidents and motives on which the personages act are never strained beyond the limits of probability. A more fastidious age might have objected to the celebration by Pseudolus of his triumph, as a grotesque excrescence: but it serves to bring out the sensual geniality underlying the audacity and roguery of his character, in contrast to the sensual brutality underlying the audacity and villainy of Ballio. When we consider the vigorous life and even the art with which the whole piece is worked out, we understand why Plautus, with good reason, took, in his old age, especial pleasure in this play. There is not much to offend a robust morality in the piece; for though the result accomplished cannot be called the triumph of virtue over vice, it is at least the triumph of a more amiable over a more detestable form of depravity.