The conventional refinement with which Menander invested his characters, and which was so happily reproduced by Terence, was not attempted by Plautus. His excellence lies rather in the bold and natural flow of his dialogue, fuller, perhaps, of spicy humour and broad fun than of wit, but of humour and fun so lighthearted and spontaneous that the soberest reader is carried away by it. In the construction of his plots he shows no great originality, though often much ingenuity. Sometimes they are adopted without change, as that of the _Trinummus_ from the _Thaesauros_ of Philemon; sometimes they are patched together [13] from two or more Greek plays, as is probably the case with the _Epidicus_ and _Captivi_; sometimes they are so slight as to amount to little more than a peg on which to hang the witty speeches of the dialogue, as, for example, those of the _Persa_ and _Curculio_. The _Menaechmi_ and _Trinummus_ are the best known of his plays; the former would be hard to parallel for effective humour: the point on which the plot turns, viz. the resemblance between two pairs of brothers, which causes one to be mistaken for the other, and so leads to many ludicrous scenes, is familiar to all readers of Shakespeare from the _Comedy of Errors_. Of those plays which border on the sentimental the best is the _Captivi_, which the poet himself recommends to the audience on the score of its good moral lesson, adding with truth-- "Huiusmodi paucas poetae reperiunt comoedias Ubi boni meliores fiant." We are told [14] that Plautus took the greatest pleasure in his _Pseudolus_, which was also the work of his old age. The _Epidicus_ also must have been a favourite with him. There is an allusion to it in the _Bacchides_, [15] which shows that authors then were as much distressed by the incapacity of the actors as they are now. "Non herus sed actor mihi cor odio sauciat. Etiam Epidicum quam ego fabulum aeque ac me ipsum amo Nullam aeque invitus specto, si agit Pellio."