ingenuity of Hood, and devises practical
jokes with all the dexterous audacity of
Sheridan. Fanciful, capricious, and graceful
in his invention, he converts allegory into
reality, and transforms fact into fiction, until
in the world of his poetic creation we discern
a strange fantastic kind of Pagan fairyland.

It is a mistake to suppose that we can
have no sympathy with those old classical
times. Precisely the same questions agitated
the minds of our Greek forefathers as perplex
the brain of their English heirs. The
young Athens of Pericles was a type of the
young England of Victoria. It had the same
follies, the same wisdom, the same doubts,
the same energy, the same popular pluck and
democratic fervour. The fruits of knowledge,
then as now, conferred the double experience
of good and evil. There was the same antagonism
between the spirit of order and the
spirit of progress. In those days, the wrong
man sometimes got into the wrong place;
and, though the chancellor of the exchequer
tried hard to do his financial sum correctly,
those horrid figures would not always come
right. In short, there was plenty to find
fault with, and Aristophanes, having a talent
for good-humoured censure, undertook to do
the work, and he did it handsomely. He
thought everybody wanted a blowing up, and
he put a handful of his explosive powder
under everybody's chair, and blew up the
ubiquitous occupant to his heart's content.
We must tell the truth about Aristophanes.
He was very hard to please. He was always
in opposition. We do not doubt his honesty
of purpose or impeach his patriotism; but
he was prejudiced, one-sided, and exclusive.
The impulses of his humour led him into
distortion and caricature. He had a microscopic
eye for the detection of flaws in
private or public life. No matter how
careful a man might be to keep his moral
attire, brushed and mended, that quick
glance discerned the slightest speck on them,
and, if there were a hole in all his coat, our
prying child was sure to report it. The
age of Pericles was an age of daring and
vigorous life, and Aristophanes was afraid of
it. There was a young Athens growing up,
and the poet had no sympathy with its
luxurious habit, its saucy inquisitiveness, or its
rhetorical display. The sceptic and the
schoolmaster were abroad; men of talent
began to explain away the venerable legends
of Greece; to doubt whether there were such
wonderful beings as Centaurs and Chimæras;
nay, whether our old propria quæ maribus
acquaintances Mars, Bacchus, Apollo, did
verily exist.

This sophistical genius of the age was
active and penetrative. Aristophanes detected
it in the attacks on religion, in the refinements
of logic, in the enervation of the
drama, in the relaxing voluptuousness of
music and song. He saw in Pericles the
author of political corruption; in Aspasia
the instigator of social corruption; in Socrates
the leader of intellectual and moral
corruption; in Cleon the representative of
demagogic corruption; in Euripides the
symbol of corruption in music and poetry.
These persons were the types of the wicked
radical reformers of his day—the enemies of
religion and morality, the infidels, atheists,
and socialists of Athens. Aristophanes was
a conservative by temperament and
conviction; a high-minded Tory gentleman of
Greece who detested stump orators, thought
a good stand-up fight or a wrestling match
far superior to any intellectual or aesthetic
development; who looked back with wistful
gaze to the good old times of Salamis and
Marathon, and, blinded by the splendours of
a heroic past, had no eyes for the grandeurs
of a speculative present. We do not
commend him for his short-sightedness; we
regret his native prejudice and artistic
exaggeration, yet, after every deduction, there
still remains a valuable residuum of truth in
the satirical sketches of this laughing
philosopher. A great licentiousness, it has been
said, treads on the heels of every reformation.
Thoughtful men cannot see the removal of
the old land-marks without some misgiving.
Reverence and loyalty, valour and pious
self-control, are often fatally impaired by the
acquisition of a partial and self-conceited
intellectualism, and the spirit of speculation
too frequently resembles Argus in the witty
description of the poet, who after boasting
omnipotence of vision, is found to be all eyes
and no sight.

And thus it happens that the girds and
home-thrusts of conservative prepossession
have their justification and value. So
interpreted, the flaming satire and the riotous
humour of the great comic poet of Greece,
have a title to our admiration and gratitude.
In exposing the excesses and absurdities, the
insolent impatience and self-sufficiency of the
fierce democracy of Athens, he warns, laughing
while he threatens, of similar faults and
failings in our own national character.

We have said that we may read in the age
of Pericles foreshadowings as it were of our
own time. As we wander, in fancy, through
the streets of that old Attic Past, we see
familiar faces crowding round us, with some
slight physiognomical differences, and we
learn that those whom we had supposed to
be new friends, are really very old acquaintances.
There is, for instance, a certain
mysterious entity known among us, as John
Bull, much addicted to roast beef and
plum-pudding. Aristophanes introduces us
to his Attic counterpart. The personified
Athenian people is a testy old gentleman of
the name of Demos, immensely enamoured
of beans. He is a little deaf, and somewhat
passionate. He lives in a house of his own
(Athens), of which a foreign tanner, called
Cleon, has the run. For he has flattered and
cajoled the old man, who appears to have