The remaining plays are based on real life; the real life that is pourtrayed by Menander, and by no means yet established in Rome, though soon to take root there with far more disastrous consequences the life of imbecile fathers made only to be duped, and spendthrift sons; of jealous husbands, and dull wives; of witty, cunning, and wholly unscrupulous slaves; of parasites, lost to all self-respect; of traffickers in vice of both sexes, sometimes cringing, sometimes threatening, but almost always outwitted by a duplicity superior to their own; of members of the _demi- monde_, whose beauty is only equalled by their shameless venality, though some of them enlist our sympathies by constancy in love, others by unmerited sufferings (which, however, always end happily); and, finally, of an array of cooks, go-betweens, confidantes, and nondescripts, who will do any thing for a dinner--a life, in short, that suggests a gloomy idea of the state into which the once manly and high-minded Athenians had sunk. It may, however, be questioned whether Plautus did not exceed his models in licentiousness, as he certainly fell below them in elegance. The drama has always been found to exercise a decided influence on public morals; and at Rome, where there was no authoritative teaching on the subject, and no independent investigation of the foundations of moral truth, a series of brilliant plays, in which life was regarded as at best a dull affair, rendered tolerable by coarse pleasures, practical jokes, and gossip, and then only as long as the power of enjoyment lasts, can have had no good effect on the susceptible minds of the audience. The want of respect for age, again, so alien to old Roman feeling, was an element imported from the Greeks, to whom at all times the contemplation of old age presented the gloomiest associations. But it must have struck at the root of all Roman traditions to represent the aged father in any but a venerable light; and inimitable as Plautus is as a humourist, we cannot regard him as one who either elevates his own art, or in any way represents the nobler aspect of the Roman mind.