igour; but the delineation
of character is here copied from without rather than reproduced from
inward experience, and the more so, the more the task approaches to
the really poetical. It is a significant circumstance that, in the
parts illustrative of character to which we have just referred,
the psychological truth is in great part represented by abstract
development of the conception; the miser here collects the parings of
his nails and laments the tears which he sheds as a waste of water.
But the blame of this want of depth in the portraying of character,
and generally of the whole poetical and moral hollowness of this newer
comedy, lay less with the comic writers than with the nation as a
whole. Everything distinctively Greek was expiring: fatherland,
national faith, domestic life, all nobleness of action and sentiment
were gone; poetry, history, and philosophy were inwardly exhausted;
and nothing remained to the Athenian save the school, the fish-market,
and the brothel. It is no matter of wonder and hardly a matter of
blame, that poetry, which is destined to shed a glory over human
existence, could make nothing more out of such a life than the
Menandrian comedy presents to us. It is at the same time very
remarkable that the poetry of this period, wherever it was able to
turn away in some degree from the corrupt Attic life without falling
into scholastic imitation, immediately gathers strength and freshness
from the ideal. In the only remnant of the mock-heroic comedy of this
period--the -Amphitruo- of Plautus--there breathes throughout a purer
and more poetical atmosphere than in all the other remains of the
contemporary stage. The good-natured gods treated with gentle irony,
the noble forms from the heroic world, and the ludicrously cowardly
slaves present the most wonderful mutual contrasts; and, after the
comical course of the plot, the birth of the son of the gods amidst
thunder and lightning forms an almost grand concluding effect But this
task of turning the myths into irony was innocent and poetical, as
compared with that of the ordinary comedy depicting the Attic life of
the period. No special accusation may be brought from a historico-
moral point of view against the poets, nor ought it to be made matter
of individual reproach to any particular poet that he occupies the
level of his epoch: comedy was not the cause, but the effect of the
corruption that prevailed in the national life. But it is nec