eartiness,
as he did, but aimed at small game, and dragged forth particular women,
which he did not. He is an aggregate of many men, all of a certain
greatness. We may build up a conception of his powers if we mount
Rabelais upon Hudibras, lift him with the songfulness of Shelley, give
him a vein of Heinrich Heine, and cover him with the mantle of the
Anti-Jacobin, adding (that there may be some Irish in him) a dash of
Grattan, before he is in motion.

But such efforts at conceiving one great one by incorporation of minors
are vain, and cry for excuse. Supposing Wilkes for leading man in a
country constantly plunging into war under some plumed Lamachus, with
enemies periodically firing the land up to the gates of London, and a
Samuel Foote, of prodigious genius, attacking him with ridicule, I
think it gives a notion of the conflict engaged in by Aristophanes.
This laughing bald-pate, as he calls himself, was a Titanic pamphleteer,
using laughter for his political weapon; a laughter without scruple,
the laughter of Hercules. He was primed with wit, as with the garlic he
speaks of giving to the game-cocks, to make them fight the better. And
he was a lyric poet of aerial delicacy, with the homely song of a jolly
national poet, and a poet of such feeling that the comic mask is at
times no broader than a cloth on a face to show the serious features
of our common likeness. He is not to be revived; but if his method
were studied, some of the fire in him would come to us, and we might be
revived.

Taking them generally, the English public are most in sympathy with
this primitive Aristophanic comedy, wherein the comic is capped by the
grotesque, irony tips the wit, and satire is a naked sword. They
have the basis of the Comic in them: an esteem for common-sense. They
cordially dislike the reverse of it. They have a rich laugh, though
it is not the gros rire of the Gaul tossing gros sel, nor the polished
Frenchman's mentally digestive laugh. And if they have now, like a
monarch with a troop of dwarfs, too many jesters kicking the dictionary
about, to let them reflect that they are dull, occasionally, like the
pensive monarch surprising himself with an idea of an idea of his own,
they look so. And they are given to looking in the glass. They must see
that something ails them. How much even the better order of them will
endure, without a thought of the defensive, when the person afflicting
them is protected from satire, we read i