ccessors as will render the former very good and the latter
very bad; and the thrusts at AEschylus which Aristophanes puts into
the mouth of Euripides go home too well to have been written by an
admirer.

"It may be observed that while Euripides accuses AEschylus of being
'pomp-bundle-worded,' which I suppose means bombastic and given to
rodomontade, AEschylus retorts on Euripides that he is a 'gossip
gleaner, a describer of beggars, and a rag-stitcher,' from which it
may be inferred that he was truer to the life of his own times than
AEschylus was. It happens, however, that a faithful rendering of
contemporary life is the very quality which gives its most permanent
interest to any work of fiction, whether in literature or painting,
and it is a not unnatural consequence that while only seven plays by
AEschylus, and the same number by Sophocles, have come down to us, we
have no fewer than nineteen by Euripides.

"This, however, is a digression; the question before us is whether
Aristophanes really liked AEschylus or only pretended to do so. It
must be remembered that the claims of AEschylus, Sophocles and
Euripides, to the foremost place amongst tragedians were held to be as
incontrovertible as those of Dante, Petrarch, Tasso and Ariosto to be
the greatest of Italian poets, are held among the Italians of to-day.
If we can fancy some witty, genial writer, we will say in Florence,
finding himself bored by all the poets I have named, we can yet
believe he would be unwilling to admit that he disliked them without
exception. He would prefer to think he could see something at any
rate in Dante, whom he could idealise more easily, inasmuch as he was
more remote; in order to carry his countrymen the farther with him, he
would endeavour to meet them more than was consistent with his own
instincts. Without some such palliation as admiration for one, at any
rate, of the tragedians, it would be almost as dangerous for
Aristophanes to attack them as it would be for an Englishman now to
say that he did not think very much of the Elizabethan dramatists. Yet
which of us in his heart likes any of the Elizabethan dramatists
except Shakespeare? Are they in reality anything else than literary
Struldbrugs?

"I conclude upon the whole that Aristophanes did not like any of the
tragedians; yet no one will deny that this keen, witt