borious erudition reveals to us, the sudden subtle modulations of the
colloquial comic verse into mock-heroic travesty of high tragedy
or lyric.

Euripides, the chief victim of Aristophanes's genius for parody, was so
burlesqued that his best known lines became by-words, and his most
ardent admirers, the very Balaustions and Euthukleses, must have grinned
when they heard them, like a pair of augurs. If we conceive five or six
Shakespearean comedies filled from end to end with ancient Pistols
hallooing to "pampered jades of Asia," and Dr. Caiuses chanting of "a
thousand vagrom posies," we may form some idea of Aristophanes's
handling of the notorious lines--

"The tongue has sworn, the mind remains unsworn."
"Thou lovest life, thy sire loves it too."
"Who knows if life and death be truly one?"

But the charm of Aristophanes does not lie in any of these things
singly, but in the combination of ingenious and paradoxical fancy with
an inexhaustible flow of apt language by which they are held up and
borne out. His personages are ready to make believe anything. Nothing
surprises them long. They enter into the spirit of each new conceit, and
can always discover fresh analogies to bear it out. The very plots of
his plays are realized metaphors or embodied conceits. And the same
concrete vividness of imagination is displayed in single scenes and
episodes. The Better and the Worse Reason plead the causes of the old
and new education in person. Cleon and Brasidas are the pestles with
which War proposes to bray Greece in a mortar; the triremes of Athens in
council assembled declare that they will rot in the docks sooner than
yield their virginity to musty, fusty Hyperbolus. The fair cities of
Greece stand about waiting for the recovery of Peace from her Well, with
dreadful black eyes, poor things; Armisticia and Harvest-Home tread the
stage in the flesh, and Nincompoop and Defraudation are among the gods.

The special metaphor or conceit of each play attracts appropriate words
and images, and creates a distinct atmosphere of its own. In the
'Knights' the air fairly reeks with the smell of leather and the
tanyard. The 'Birds' transport us to a world of trillings and pipings,
and beaks and feathers. There is a buzzing and a humming and a stinging
throughout the 'Wasps.' The 'Clouds' drip with mist, and are dim with
aerial vaporous effects.

Aristophanes was the original inventor of Bob Acres's style of oath--the