ed hero, with all the
strength, boldness, and dignity of olden time. In Sophocles and
Euripides, it may be perhaps the same hero; but with the former, he
has put on the flowing robes, the elegant address, and the soft
urbanity of a polished age; with the latter, he is yielding to some
melancholy emotion, ever heedless of his posture or gait, and casting
his unvalued drapery negligently about him. They have been compared by
an illustration from another art: "The sublime and daring AEschylus
resembles some strong and impregnable castle situated on a rock, whose
martial grandeur awes the beholder--its battlements defended by
heroes, and its gates proudly hung with trophies." Sophocles appears
with splendid dignity, like some imperial palace of richest
architecture; the symmetry of the parts and the chaste magnificence of
the whole delight the eye and command the approbation of the judgment.
The pathetic and moral Euripides has the solemnity of a Gothic temple,
whose storied windows admit a dim religious light, enough to show its
high embowed roof, and the monuments of the dead which rise in every
part, impressing our minds with pity and terror as emblems of the
uncertain and short duration of human greatness, and with an awful
sense of our own mortality.

ARISTOPHANES.

Very little is known about the life of Aristophanes. He was born about
444 B.C., and devoted himself to comic poetry. He wrote fifty-four
plays, of which eleven are extant.

The comedies of Aristophanes are universally regarded as the standard
of Attic writing in its greatest purity. His genius was vast,
versatile, and original, and his knowledge of human nature surpassed
by Homer and Shakspeare alone.

The noble tone of morals, the elevated taste, the sound political
wisdom, the boldness and acuteness of the satire, the grand object,
which is seen throughout, of correcting the follies of the day, and
improving the condition of his country--all these are features in
Aristophanes, which, however disguised, as they intentionally are, by
coarseness and buffoonery, entitle him to the highest respect from
every reader of antiquity. He condescended, indeed, to play the part
of jester to the Athenian tyrant. But his jests were the vehicles for
telling to them the soundest truths. They were never without a far
higher aim than to raise a momentary laugh. He was no farce writer,
but a deep philosophical politician; grieved and ashamed at the
condition of his