Birds for a moment forget the solemnity of the occasion, and, rushing forward, begin to peck up the meal voraciously.

Hardly are the sacrificial rites over, when Plausible begins to be besieged by hungry applicants for his bounty. The acting in this scene was excellent throughout, both on the part of Plausible and on that of the successive charlatans, for, while it was spirited all through, it never fell from the level of comedy to that of pantomime, a result to which the successive drubbings might easily have led. The sense of a region attractive to impostors was so vividly conveyed, that it would have appeared quite natural and proper if the personages above mentioned had been followed by others more familiar to the spectators.

A second and shorter parabasis having given Plausible a wellearned breathing-space, enter a helmeted and winged messenger. The great design has been accomplished. The walls of Nephelococcygia have been built. They are about twice as high as those of Babylon, and so broad that if Longbow, driving four horses abreast, met Swagger with a like team, they could easily pass each other; and it has all been done by birds! But lo, a second messenger, a winged archer, clearly one of the city police. The goddess Iris (it seems) has slipped through the jays who guard the frontier, and has entered the city. Aristophanes seems to have imagined Iris as wearing a broad-brimmed hat, and with many-coloured ribbons or streamers floating from her robe as she flies; hence, Plausible says to her, "What am I to call you? bark or bonnet ?" (πλоîον îкvvî; V. 1203). Wisely, perhaps, no attempt was made to represent this, the Cambridge Iris being hatless, with ordinary wings painted in the rainbow tints. Hardly has Iris gone, breathing tragic threats, when a herald arrives from earth, with a gold wreath as a tribute from men, which finds a different reception from the similar offering of Mr. Tracy Turnerelli. The dignified "Thanks!" of Plausible, as he placed the wreath on his head, was very good. The Informer, who presently appears, was most judiciously "made up," with long straight hair (was this touch consciously taken from Plato's Euthyphro, where Meletus, the accuser of Socrates, is described as Teтavó0pi?) and generally with an unkempt air of hungry rascality which left nothing to be desired. From an historical point of view, nothing in the play is so luridly vivid as this Aristophanic sketch of the man whose trade it is, as it was his father's and grandfather's before him, to ruin innocent men by false accusations.

Anon Prometheus comes in disguised, under a huge sunshade (lest Zeus should see him), to whisper that the gods are starving. The broad burlesque has its climax at the point (v. 1547) where Prometheus permits himself the luxury of one shout of defiance to Zeus, and then instantly cowers down again under his umbrella. A Greek audience would have had the Prometheus of Eschylus before

their minds. It is the humour of this tacit contrast which must lift the scene above the level of buffoonery. The exit of Prometheus closed Act II. (v. 1552).

Enter three envoys, Poseidon is known His nephew Heracles

When the curtain rises on Act III., the scene is on the ramparts of Cloud-cuckoo-borough. A still unfinished gateway reminds us that we are in a new-born city. In the foreground on the left, a canopy of bright colour protects a stove at which Plausible, helped by slaves, is busy cooking some savoury mess. sent by the starving gods to treat for peace. by his trident and the tint of his robe. has the lion's skin dangling from his shoulders, and carries a truly formidable club-once the property, we believe, of an American Indian. The third envoy is a "Triballian," the delegate of the barbarian gods. He wears blue trousers, and carries a gaudy blue-and-gold shield. He has, indeed, adopted a Greek cloak for the nonce, but has put it on over his right instead of his left shoulder. Poseidon, as he notices this with horror, and hastens to readjust the cloak, exclaims, "Democracy, what will you bring us to when this fellow has been elected a god ?" Mr. Tatham was very amusing as the Triballian, who is supposed to have exasperating little tricks of barbarian behaviour. Thus, while his Greek companions are engaged in parley, he jangles a huge necklace which he wears until the jarring noise makes Poseidon turn round. Heracles, who has come resolved to throttle the rebel, cannot resist the flesh pots of the cloud city. The terms of Plausible are ultimately accepted. He is to marry Basileia ("Royalty"), guardian of the lightnings, the wisdom, and the wealth of Zeus. A short entr'acte precedes the closing scene. Mr. Parry's music for the choral song here raised the tone of the conclusion in just the right way—notably in the coda, which agreeably suggests a strain of romance in the character of a hero whose marriage might otherwise have appeared to have been dictated by considerations of a quite different order. The wedding-march for the entry of Plausible and his bride are full of life, and are likely to be popular, if we may judge from the fact that it has already figured in the programme of more than one concert. The final tableau on the stagethe chorus of Birds grouped around Plausible and Basileia, while the Hoopoe, raised behind their thrones, seems to be saying, "Bless you, my children"—was in a high degree brilliant and beautiful.

The performance was, indeed, a complete and signal success, on which the managers and the actors are alike to be congratulated. Now that the experiment has been so entirely justified by the result, it seems worth while to think for a moment why it seemed so daring beforehand, and how far it was favoured, or the reverse, by any tendencies of the present day in literature or drama.

At the end of Plato's Symposium, a guest who had fallen

asleep awakes at cock-crow to hear Socrates still discoursing with two of the company. These are the tragic poet Agathon and the comic poet Aristophanes. Socrates is constraining them to admit that "it belongs to the same man to know how to compose tragedy and comedy; and that the man who is in art a tragic poet is also a comic poet." Both the poets are by this time half asleep, and can scarcely follow him; Aristophanes drops off first, then Agathon; Socrates lays them in comfortable attitudes, and departs to take a morning bath, preparatory to visiting the Lyceum, and spending the day there in discourse as usual. The essential identity of tragic with comic art was for Socrates, of course, merely an illustration of the maxim that no one really knows a thing unless he knows its opposite. But there is another and quite different sense in which the saying happens to be true of that Greek Tragedy and Comedy which his two hearers respectively represented.

The origin of Greek drama was personal sympathy with the god Dionysus. He was imagined as bringing glad gifts and precious rites to men, which they most often embraced with thankful joy, but which sometimes they resisted, until their necks had been bowed to his yoke. Before Dionysus could fully exact the worship due to him, he had to vanquish foes, human and divine. He was at times a sufferer as well as a conqueror; his fortune had its seasons of darkness, as dark days usher in the sunshine which is to make the vines ready for the vintage. Tragedy and Comedy were the corresponding moods of his worshippers. The motive of Comedy was to be in harmony with his mirth, as the motive of Tragedy was to honour him in the graver aspects of his godhead--in its passion and its anguish.

Hence the conception which made Aristophanic Comedy a thing by itself. The measure of its license was what Dionysus was believed to enjoy, or to tolerate, when he was in his happiest mood of wild frolic. How, then, was the personal character of Dionysus conceived? In the first place, he was conceived as a jovial and rollicking sensualist. Aristophanic Comedy, accordingly, reflects his free indulgence in the coarsest pleasures of the senses. Then he loved practical jokes, sometimes of a very rough kind. So Comedy had its element of horse-play, its rough-and-tumble "business," in which the jester and his butt are related, much as the clown and pantaloon of pantomime. But the mischievous humour of Dionysus had also a subtler and more sinister mood, such a mood as appears in the irony with which, in the Bacchae of Euripides, he plays around Pentheus before he destroys him. And, therefore, Comedy has its scathing and merciless satire, satire directed alike against public men and against vice or folly in private life. Again, Dionysus is conspicuously a conqueror; he may be resisted for a while, but in the end he bears down all opposition. Comedy, in like manner, has a ring of exultant, even insolent triumph for the cause which the

poet espouses: what Pentheus is to Dionysus, Cleon is to Aristophanes. Lastly, Dionysus is one who, as the giver of physical rapture, turns the work-a-day world topsy-turvy, and opens to his votaries a region of fantastic ecstasy. And Comedy also had its flights into a wonderland of fancy, where gods, men, and beasts are mingled in grotesque action at the caprice of the poet.

The Greeks imagined all their principal deities as endued, more or less, with a sense of humour. The form in which this sense manifested itself might sometimes be rather grim, as when the Furies of Eschylus tell us that "the god laughs at the hot-blooded man" who is vainly struggling with his doom. But the Olympian sense of humour is normally marked rather by a not unkindly irony, such as is naturally associated with the restrained consciousness of vast power. The really great and strong are not usually apt to resent a little harmless mirth in their inferiors. The Greek paid his gods the compliment of believing that they could bear-indeed, rather liked a certain amount of "chaff"-though some tact was required, of course, just as it is when the same delicate form of flattery is administered to the mighty of this world. An element of Dionysiac comedy, a spring of "unquenchable laughter," was deep in the heart of Greek polytheism; and when laughter ripples now and again over the noblest and most serious utterances of the popular faith-as when Hephaestus puffs and pants as he limps along before the laughing gods-this does not indicate a decay of belief, but exactly the reverse. It is a sign of hearty, natural vigour in the frank anthropomorphism on which the whole system rests. I emphasize this, because no one can understand the spirit of much that is best in Greek literature unless he clearly apprehends that the poetry which gives us the limping Homeric Hephaestus is absolutely distinct from-nay, is diametrically opposite to the mocking scepticism which animates Lucian's Dialogues of the Gods. The most extraordinary estimate of the Iliad which has perhaps ever appeared in print is based on a failure to perceive this distinction (the italics are ours) :

"To me," (says this writer) "the general tone of the Iliad' sounds like that of Don Quixote: there runs through the greater part of it a mocking laugh which holds up to scorn all that had claimed the deepest reverence of the Greek people. Time after time the heroes come before us like Hêraklês in the Birds of Aristophanês. .... But if the time-honoured heroes of Greek legend fare badly, the gods fare much worse. The depth of cynical unbelief betrayed in such gratuitous narratives as the charming of Zeus by Hêrê (Il. xiv. 153 sq.), or the abuse lavished by Zeus on the two contumacious goddesses Hêrê and Athênê (viii. 447-56), or the wounding of Aphroditê and Arês by Diomêdês (v. 330-43, 855-63), hardly finds its parallel in Aristophanês, and we must go to Lucian to meet with it again." 1

Strangely as this misrepresents the Iliad, it misrepresents Aristophanes not less completely. The comic poet was an orthodox Athenian Tory, "worshipping the gods whom the city worshipped," detesting new-fangled notions alike in religion, politics, and society, and

(1) Professor A. H. Sayce, in the Journal of Philology, vol. xii. p. 38.

thoroughly imbued with the genuine traditions of the popular national faith. The gods themselves, Aristophanes held, entered into the frolic of the Dionysiac carnival. At that season of licensed mirth Zeus himself would submit to be caricatured: Zeus himself would share the good-humour of the poet and of the audience.

Still, Comedy, like Tragedy, was, after all, an act of worship. I have never seen it noticed, but it seems worthy of remark, that, precisely in those comedies which most daringly ridicule the gods, Aristophanes has given, as if by way of counterpoise, a serious expression of religious feeling. Thus in the Birds we have free mockery of the Olympians and the heroes. But we have also such a passage of grave and chastened beauty as this in the Hoopoe's song (I quote from Dr. Kennedy's translation) :—

"So when thy brown beak is thrilling
With that holy music-trilling,
Through the woodbine's leafy bound
Swells the pure melodious sound
To the throne of Zeus: and there
Phoebus of the golden hair,
Hearing, to thine elegies
With the awaken'd chords replies
Of his ivory-clasped lyre,
Stirring all the Olympian quire;
Till from each immortal tongue
Of that blessed heavenly throng
Peals the full harmonious song."

Take the Frogs again. There, Dionysus himself, with the lion's skin over his otherwise effeminate attire, is made a most ludicrous figure, and is placed in all manner of humiliating plights. On the other hand, the same comedy gives us the lofty choral chant of the Mystae, the votaries who have been initiated into the most solemn rites of his worship, as they move with flaming torches through the murky regions of the dead.

The Peace is as fantastic as the Birds or the Frogs. But it does not point any mockery of similar boldness against any particular god. So far as the Olympians are satirised, the satire is general, and not very keen. And so, in the Peace, we find no serious expression of a religious sentiment similar to those quoted above. The Birds and the Frogs are the most representative examples of Dionysiac Comedy, because they touch its limits. Daring travesty of the immortals is carried to the furthest point. The deeper feeling which was at the heart of the whole festival is also uttered in its noblest form. These two plays illustrate a principle of the old Attic Comedy which is not less important-if we desire to see it from the old Greek point of view-than the more obvious features on which critics have been wont chiefly to dwell. It might be described, perhaps, as the principle of compensatory reverence.

Our age has shown a relish for literary parody on the occasions—