When it comes to Aristophanes' turn to discourse, it is found that either from repletion or from some other cause, a fit of the hiccups is upon him, and he is unable to speak; and he says to the doctor, who is reclining a little further down

"You are the proper person either to stop my hiccups, or to speak in my turn."

The doctor promises to do both; tells the poet to hold his breath, and if this will not do, to gargle water; or if both these fail, he recommends him to tickle his nose till he sneezes.

"You will not say one word," replies Aristophanes, "till I do so." It is hard to say whether the grotesque dissertation that shortly follows is mostly Aristophanes or mostly Plato; it seems a marriage of both, yet it is characteristic of the former: like his own creations, it is a piece of consummate art, and this is what we find in him throughout. Upon every page there is the unmistakable stamp of genius. He paints upon his canvas just what he wishes to paint, and does it so well that we assent to it and call it Nature. Even when the great and good Socrates is brought before us, held up in a basket, "walking in the air and speculating about the sun," we are forced to join in the laugh, and, worse, to applaud the wrong.

"The philosopher who wore no under-garments," says Mr. Cotton, "and the same upper robes in both summer and winter; who generally went barefoot, and appears to have possessed one pair of shoes which lasted him a lifetime; who used to stand for hours in a public place in a fit of abstraction; to say nothing of his snub-nose and extraordinary face and figure; could hardly expect to escape the licence. of the old comedy."

It is reported that Plato, "the beloved disciple," sent to the tyrant of Syracuse a copy of "The Clouds" of Aristophanes, as the best expression of the state of things at Athens.

EACH of the two great centuries of Athens, the century of Pericles and the century of Alexander, had its picture of society: that of the former was called the old comedy, and its representative was Aristophanes; that of the latter, the new comedy, and its representative was Menander. We can form a sort of general though imperfect idea of the difference between the two, if we liken the old comedy to our modern burlesque, and the new comedy to our modern dramas, such as the "School for Scandal," and "The Rivals." The new comedy was the beginning of what are sometimes called society plays.

Menander was born at Athens, 342 B.C. His uncle, Alexis, was a dramatist of considerable repute in comedy, and apparently taught him the principles of his art at an early age. The philosopher and moralist,

Theophrastus, who excelled in delineation of character, was his master; but another philosopher, who exercised great influence over his early studies, was his friend and school-fellow, Epicurus. Though not a disciple of Epicurus, he imbibed the same philosophic principles, from the elegant and indolent society in which they lived, believing the chief end of life to be intellectual enjoyment, founded on material well-being. During the ten years that Athens was governed by the magistrate Demetrius, 317 to 307 B.C., the comedies of Menander, with their polished tone and lively mocking sentiments, were admirably suited to the tastes of Athenian society; but the fall of Demetrius provoked a reaction, and subjected Menander to violent persecution. He might have sought a refuge with Demetrius at the court of the Ptolemies in Egypt, and was flatteringly urged to do so, but he preferred to remain at Athens, fighting his way, multiplying his masterpieces-the number of plays attributed to him is about one hundred-and disputing the laurel crown with rivals but too often declared superior to him by the bad taste and injustice of his fellow-citizens. He was drowned while bathing at the port of Piræus, when fifty-two years of age.

In spite of his talents, Menander did not obtain from his contemporaries the position he merited. Of the hundred times that he competed for the prize, he was but eight times crowned.

Beaten when living by his unworthy rivals, who owed their success to intrigue rather than merit, posterity has avenged his memory, and given him the first rank in the new comedy, a position as incontestable as that of Homer in epos, and Demosthenes in eloquence. Grammarians, in fact, give him the second place among poets, after Homer; Plutarch highly praises him; all the Roman comic poets, Plautus, Cecilius, Terence, and Afranius, acknowledged him their standard; his plays were popular in the best society of Greece and Rome five centuries after his death, and even later, for it was not until the Byzantine priests obtained permission from the emperors to burn his works with those of Philemon and Sappho, that the plays of Menander disappeared for ever from the world. The fathers appear to have had less fear of the rude licence of Aristophanes, whose works remained untouched, than of the soft refinement and seductive verse of Menander.

It is from a study of his Roman imitators, that our knowledge of their master's dramatic skill has been gleaned. Among them, Terence borrowed four pieces out of six from Menander's works, not unfrequently repeating whole pages of text unaltered, a plagiary that led Julius Cæsar to call him a "half Menander."

Comedy may be said to have three elements-action, character, and manners. Aristophanes makes the action merely the poetical development of an idea; other dramatists make it a bond of union between short episodes, which are pictures of contemporary manners. The new comedy

made the action an intrigue, a series of incidents born of some fact in domestic life, gradually complicated and finally resolved. This intrigue, though simple, and becoming by frequent repetitions somewhat monotonous-for life among the ancients was less complex than among the moderns-served to bring the characters into play.

Menander was said to excel in the invention and arrangement of these intrigues; but it is probable that in this his rivals were his superiors. What the drama owes to him is its creation of characters. The good taste of the refined age in which Menander lived would not tolerate the gross sensualities of the previous century, and the young poets of the new comedy were obliged to paint vice and ridicule in general terms, instead of putting actual persons upon the stage. This gradually led to the formation of types; types moreover which, in a very short time, grew to be conventional: young lovers, light and dark; fathers, stern and complacent; mothers, kind and unkind; slaves, faithful and otherwise; and of maidens, a large assortment. Thus Menander put Athenian society upon the stage, but he gave it the common passions of the human race, the follies and vices which belong to all time; the father, the lover, the maiden, the wily slave, and the courtesan, are his most ordinary figures; but he has drawn men of all professions, and also all those morbid characters which make masterpieces--" the jealous," "the superstitious," misers, gluttons, misanthropes. The "Book of Characters,” by Theophrastus, contains the sketches which Menander made portraits, giving them colour and life.

As before mentioned, along with this creation of characters there grew up what we call the intrigue or plot, a tangled web to be unravelled at the end. In this happy invention Menander joins hands with Euripides as one of the chief makers of dramatic art.

The antique statue of Menander in the Vatican, from which our portrait is taken, has preserved his features. The critics, Schlegel and Guizot, find in this marble a faithful image of his genius. "The head is slightly inclined and turned a little to the left; neither the wrinkles of age nor the anguish of pain have contracted the features; but habits of reflection have imprinted on the broad high forehead their austere signs, while at the same time the mouth with slightly projecting lips gently pressed together by a suppressed smile, seems ready to transform into sharp epigrams the thoughts flitting through the mind. All the features breathe the easy confidence born of intimate self-knowledge and long experience of men, the grace of natural gaiety, and an indulgent spirit of mockery."

Menander often dwelt on the miseries of old age, and has epitomized his sentiments on this subject in the well-known saying, "Whom the gods love die young."

T. CARUS LUCRETIUS and Julius Cæsar were the only men of letters ever produced by Rome. Martha, in his monograph upon Lucretius, notes this fact, and adds, that the poet may have owed to the accident of his birth, and to the natural training received in the capital of the world, that singular freedom of thought rarely to be found outside a great metropolis. Voltaire was born a Parisian.

Lucretius was of high birth, coming of the renowned family which had given to the world a grand type of heroism, the virtuous Lucretia. Thus by his position he might have been a soldier and a statesman; but political honours were not in accordance with his desires; he was a student, a poet, a philosopher. His destiny was to live a "hidden