been of opinion that there's nothing like
leather, and has accordingly been completely
won over by the impudent intruder's little
presents of calfskin: his worthless promises
and windy complements being compared to
mere scraps and parings of hide; for he
takes care to give away only what is of no
use to himself. At length the tanner
encounters a sausage-seller, who undertakes to
prove to his master that he is not worthy of
the confidence which he reposes in him. A
trial of logical skill takes place between the
two rivals. Each insists on his superior
devotion to the Athenian John Bull.

"Have you even given him as much as
a sole from your private hoard for his
poor old feet," asks the seller of sausages;
"you, who pretend to love him so, and have
got so many hides of your own?"

"Certainly not," says Bull of Athens,
answering the question for the parsimonious
tanner.

"What can you think of such a fellow,
then?" demands the elated seller of sausages.
"Look at me! See what I've got for you.
A nice new pair of shoes."

"You are the best man in the world,"
cries Demos. "You show such a kind feeling
for my town—and my toes!"

The man of hides afterwards returns to the
charge, and reads a pretended oracle, in
which Apollo orders Demos to preserve the
Sacred Dog. The old man does not understand.
The disinterested currier replies:

"I am the dog; for I howl in your
defence."

A similar pretension was lately preferred
by a modern tribune of the people, who, after
relating his touching apologue of the honest,
but too confiding farmer, who couldn't take
care of his own homestead, and the vigilant
and vociferous Tear'em, who kept off those
horrid marauders from over the water,
pointed the moral by a personal application:
"You, gentlemen, are the highly respectable
agriculturist of my story. You haven't the
wit to look after your own affairs: but never
mind. Tear'em will do it for you. Who is
Tear'em? I'm Tear'em!"

A fresh instance this, for the lovers of the
good old times, of the profound aphorism
that there is nothing new under the sun.

Aristophanes was not a member of the
Peace Society, but he was duly sensible of
the horrors of war, and, had he lived now,
might have shared the bold but reasonable
aspiration of our happier age, that Mars
himself may one day be sent to the right
about. At any rate, his strong predilection
for peace appears in a wild, fanciful drama
bearing that name. Trygœus, a rustic
patriot, disgusted at the continuance of the
Peloponnesian war, resolves to visit Jupiter,
and remonstrate with him. To this end, he
trains and feeds a gigantic beetle, meaning
to ride up to Olympus on its back. His
little girls try to dissuade him, telling him
that if he will fly where the birds are, he
must expect to "go to the crows," or, in
plain English, to the dogs. Trygœus answers,
that he can't endure to hear them asking for
bread, when he has no bread to give, and no
money to buy it with; but that if he only
succeeds in the object of his journey, he will
come and give them plenty of rolls, and rod-
sauce, too, if they want it!

"But how can you go, for a ship won't
take you?" rejoins one tiny prattler.

"I have got a little horse with wings; I
shan't go by sea," is the father's reply.

"Dear little papa, what can you mean?
Saddling a beetle and riding to the gods?"

"Yes, my dear, Æsop tells us that a beetle
is the only thing with wings that ever made
its way to the gods!"

"O, papa! papa! don't tell such a story.
A nasty ugly beetle go to see the gods,
indeed!"

Nothing daunted, however, our patriot
accomplishes his aerial journey, finds the
gods emigrated, and a monstrous dæmon,
War, pounding the Greek states with a huge
pestle and mortar. Peace, he is informed,
has been cast into a deep cave by this
unparalleled chemist and druggist. Trygœus
determines to rescue her; and, attended by
a number of husbandmen, furnished with
shovels, engines, and ropes, he repairs to the
dungeon in which Peace and her lovely
companions are immured, and restores to light
the greatest of all goddesses, and the most
friendly to the vine, calling, in his
enthusiastic admiration of her charms, for a
ten-thousand-firkin expression, to greet the
goddess worthily.

The poets have always been a favourite
subject of ridicule. Athens made fun of her
poets with as hearty good will as we do of
ours. If a modern satirist, parodying
Montgomery, describe him as raving "in all the
rapt rabidity of rhyme," our old comedian
laughs at Æschylus for his "words as big as
bulls, with brows and crests, tremendous
fellows with terrible phizzes whom nobody
knows." If we laugh at the happy travesty
of the earlier style of Wordsworth:

      Aunt Hannah heard the window break,
      And cried, O, naughty Nancy Lake.
      Thus to distress your aunt!
      No Drury Lane for you to-day.
      And while papa said, Pooh! she may,
      Mamma said, No she shan't.

The Athenians equally enjoyed the Aristophanic
burlesque of the repetitions and effeminacies
of Euripides' poetry—

       With the dawn I was beginning
       Spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning,
       Unconscious of the meditated crime,
       Meaning to sell my yarn at market-time;
       Now tears alone are left me,
       My neighbour hath bereft me
       Of all, of all, of all, all but a tear,
       Since he, my faithful, trusty Chanticleer,
       Is flown, is flown, is gone, is gone.