peatedly boasts of the fertility of his invention,
and claims to have discarded the coarse farce of his predecessors for
something more worthy of the refined intelligence of his clever
audience. Yet it must be acknowledged that much even of his wit is the
mere filth-throwing of a naughty boy; or at best the underbred
jocularity of the "funny column," the topical song, or the minstrel
show. There are puns on the names of notable personages; a grotesque,
fantastic, punning fauna, flora, and geography of Greece; a constant
succession of surprises effected by the sudden substitution of low or
incongruous terms in proverbs, quotations, and legal or religious
formulas; scenes in dialect, scenes of excellent fooling in the vein of
Uncle Toby and the Clown, girds at the audience, personalities that for
us have lost their point,--about Cleonymus the caster-away of shields,
or Euripides's herb-selling mother,--and everywhere unstinted service to
the great gods Priapus and Cloacina.

A finer instrument of comic effect is the parody. The countless parodies
of the lyric and dramatic literature of Greece are perhaps the most
remarkable testimony extant to the intelligence of an Athenian audience.
Did they infallibly catch the allusion when Dicaeopolis welcomed back to
the Athenian fish-market the long-lost Copaic eel in high
AEschylean strain,--

"Of fifty nymphs Copaic alderliefest queen,"

and then, his voice breaking with the intolerable pathos of Admetus's
farewell to the dying Alcestis, added,

"Yea, even in death
Thou'lt bide with me, embalmed and beet-bestewed"?

Did they recognize the blasphemous Pindaric pun in "Helle's holy
straits," for a tight place, and appreciate all the niceties of diction,
metre, and dramatic art discriminated in the comparison between
Aeschylus and Euripides in the 'Frogs'? At any rate, no Athenian could
miss the fun of Dicaeopolis (like Hector's baby) "scared at the dazzling
plume and nodding crest" of the swashbuckler Lamachus, of Philocleon,
clinging to his ass's belly like Odysseus escaping under the ram from
the Cyclops's cave; of the baby in the Thesmophoriazusae seized as a
Euripidean hostage, and turning out a wine bottle in swaddling-clothes;
of light-foot Iris in the role of a saucy, frightened soubrette; of the
heaven-defying AEschylean Prometheus hiding under an umbrella from the
thunderbolts of Zeus. And they must have felt instinctively what only a
la