Dic. Falling tear and prayer submissive Dic. Hear, O hear me ! We have ears, but not for thee. Chor. I'll not hear thee-death must guerdon deeds so bold. Dic. (enraged.) Blow for blow then let us bandy, damn'd be he that first cries hold. On a wight your vengeance falls not-unprovided-unpreparedWith the nearest and the dearest of your friends must it be shared. Chor. (to his companions.) Sons and wardsmen of Acharnæ, whence this threat of retribution? - Speak, explain,-my wildered brain seeks in vain for a solution, Hath he bairn of any present, hath he prisoner hous'd within ? Whence hath he such boldness gather'd? Dic. (exhibiting something in his hand.) Now let Fate her work begin: We have here that in the drama shall enact a foremost partSurest test to prove who best loves his craft and trade at heart. Chor. All is over-darkness cover me and mine within the grave! (To Dic.) O let prayer and humble tear this my toy, my darling save! Explanation-supplication Dic. Both are preaching to the wind. Chor. Warm petition and submission— Seas are deaf and rocks are blind,' We have no room for further extracts from this play. We would only allude to the famous defence of Dicæopolis, beginning in the original at line 497, (which Mr M. has translated with considerable spirit), in order to notice a singular mistake of a most ingenious and lamented author, the late Member for Banbury.-Mr Douglas refers the animated picture of bustling preparation so well described in the concluding lines of the speech to the fitting-out of the Sicilian expedition. As the Acharnians was written in the sixth year of the Peloponnesian war, and the armament against Syracuse was not sent out till the seventeenth, it is needless to point out that this is an erroneous notion. Our Edinburgh readers will perhaps forgive us too for hinting at an Athenian custom expressed in line 617, which will be very intelligible to those who remember how rife the cry of Gardez l'eau, I once was in the streets of our beautiful metropolis, and what it portended. Edinburgh has been called the modern Athens:-but we trust that no one will sup pose this to be the strongest point of similitude. Douglas on the Modern Greeks, p. 164. The warning at Athens was not so specifically worded ;- άπαντες ΕΞΙΣΤΩ παρήνουν οι φιλοτά -- It must be evident by this time to our readers, that the Ancient Comedy rested none of its claims to admiration upon variety of incident or intricacy of plot. The plays of Aristophanes, with the highest finish of execution, display the utmost baldness of design. We cannot indeed agree with Lord Shaftesbury (who seems to follow Aristotle in assigning a great preeminence to the Grecian Tragedy)-in thinking that the truth of characters, the beauty of order, and the imitation of nature, were wholly unknown to the comedians; to whom he yet assigns a perfection in style and language, and an amazing fertility in all the turns and diversities of humour. * We think, on the contrary, the imitation of nature exact; the truth of character uniformly preserved; and the beauty of order maintained, as far as order can be beautiful that is entirely simple, that never diverges from straight lines, nor deviates into the winding lineaments of grace.' The character of Demus in the very play we are now going to examine, which, as professing to exhibit an exact portrait of a whole people with all their peculiarities, required great powers for accurate observation and faithful copying, is, says Mr Mitchell, an immortal proof of rich invention, discrimination, and acuteness.' • Even < as a drama,' he elsewhere observes, the Knights has always held a very high rank, and not undeservedly. But the Grecian Comedies, though true in the delineation of character, and of consequence in those delineations strict in their fidelity to nature, disdained the additional embellishment of interesting action. They have abundance of jokes пag' vα, pleasantries by surprise, but few incidents of the same description. Any simple fiction served as a vehicle for Satire, Politics, Criticism, and Poetry, the prime ingredients in the intellectual repast offered by the comic poet to his audience; and a little 6 * Characteristicks, p. 245. We do not precisely see how a writer can be perfect in style and language, which are to be put in the mouths of different characters, without keeping to the truth of character or fertile in all the turns and varieties of humour, without imitating nature. Some critics will have it that the characters of Aristophanes are all generic, that is, that each is the embodied likeness of a tribe or genus, the personification of an abstract idea, not of a real individual.-In this way, every comic or tragic character may be called the representative of a genus, at least as long as there shall be points of resemblance among mankind,--as long as each individual does not stand per se, distinct, isolated, without model and without copy. Is not Socrates an individual portrait ? are not Cleon, Euripides (in the Frogs) strong individual portraits? garnishing of buffoonery mixed up with them, made the treat be exquisitely relished by every class of Athenians, The plan of the Knights is even more straight-forward and unadorned than that of the Acharnians; but it is a play of a much higher order in every other point. The professed object,' says Mr Mitchell, of this singular composition is the overthrow of that powerful demagogue, whom the author had professed in his Acharnians (Act II.) that it was his intention at some future day "to cut into shoe-leather;" and his assistants on the occasion are the very persons, for whose service the exploit was to take place,-the rich proprietors, who among the Athenians constituted the class of Horsemen or Knights. For this purpose Athens. is here represented as a house Demus (a personification of the whole Athenian people) is the master of it; Nicias and Demosthenes (the General not the Orator), names too familiar to the reader of history to need explanation, are his slaves; and Cleon is his confidential servant and slave-driver. The levelling disposition of the Athenians could not have been presented with a more agreeable picture. If the dramatis personæ are few, the plot of the piece is still more meagre; it consists merely of a series of humiliating pictures of Cleon, and a succession of proofs to Demus, that this favourite servant is wholly unworthy of the trust and confidence reposed in him. The manners are strictly confined to Athens, and might almost be thought to belong to a people who imagined with the Indian, that his own little valley comprehended the whole world; and that the sun rose on one side of it, only to set again on the other.' Mr Mitchell justly ascribes great value to this comedy as an historical document, giving a strong, full, and faithful picture of the most singular people that ever existed.' Yet we cannot but observe that he dwells, both in his argument and notes, with too much satisfaction upon the darker shades of the portrait. He seems to lose all sight of moderation, and absolutely run riot in his unsparing abuse of republicanism and popular orators. We would just beg leave to accompany him in his triumph, like the slave of the Roman chariot, and whisper in his ear THOU also art a man ;-with all 6 your national par 'tiality you must confess that Demus and your own John Bull have somewhat more than an exterior resemblance.' Demus indeed has no wife to read him lectures on the indispensable • duty of cuckoldom,' but he has the knavish servant, the false ally, the traitorous friend, and all the wantonness of humour, wildness of caprice, and depth of gullibility, that distinguish the famous representative of the English national character. We cannot be supposed to entertain much affection for a people who could suffer Miltiades to die in prison, and Themistocles. in exile; but aversion may be pushed to the limits of injustice. How are we to expect any candour from a writer who begins his work by making the Cato-street Conspiracy a grave, and doubtless in his opinion a powerful, argument, for taking that exclusive view of politics which he at the same time acknowledges should be carefully avoided: † who eulogizes Dante for his very doubtful equity, to say no worse of it, in condemning Brutus and Cassius, with Judas Iscariot betwixt them, to a place which Julius Cæsar or Augustus had a much better claim to occupy and who can express his cordial concurrence with that most violent and groundless dogma of Xenophon, • that any one, not immediately in the rank of the people, who prefers living in a democratical rather than in an oligarchical government, must be a villain by anticipation, and acts upon the consciousness, that it is easier to be a bad man and to escape detection in a state where the government is in the hands of the many, than it is in a state where the govern ment is in the hands of the few?' || What will Mr Mitchell say to Montaigne, whose honest opinion that a man ought to ⚫ be contented with that form of government, and those funda• mental constitutions of it, which he received from his ances< tors, and under which himself was born,' gives him a right to be heard on this question,—and who nevertheless freely confesses, that if he could have chosen his place of birth, it should have been under the republic of Venice,-a government approaching much nearer to the democracy of Athens, than to the odious oligarchy, or monarchy, or whatever else we must term it, of Xenophon's favourite Lacedæmon? Mitford appears to be the great master of political wisdom, whom Mr Mitchell has chosen to follow: and our readers must be pretty generally aware of what respect is due to the prejudices of an historian who makes heroes of the cold-blooded Darius, the cruel Xerxes, and almost of the frantic Cambyses, while he can bestow an elaborate frigidity upon his account of Marathon, and toil to deepen every stain upon the patriotic virtues of Demosthenes. We say this without meaning in the least to detract from the praises he deserves for the great care and attention he has employed in the compilation of his history; but the student will be bitterly disappointed who expects to find it rich either in impartial views or liberal opinions. * Preface, p. xii. + Ibid. The great Devil's mouth, -as Dryden calls it; see the Inferno, Canto XXXIV. and Mitchell's Preface, p. xiii. Mr Mitchell seems so fond of this sentiment that he quotes it twice; see his Prelim. Discourse, p. cxliii. and Translation, p. 293. Without, however, being hurried away in our feelings by any glosses or remarks of commentator or translator, we must consider the Knights an everlasting monument of the power, patriotism, and skill of Aristophanes. Cleon appears to have been in his imagination as the centre of a circle, into which all that society exhibits of the mean and the ridiculous, all that folly contains of the weak and the imbecile, and all that vice displays of the odious and disgusting, was, as a matter of course, to be drawn. * That good humour, which, in spite of the opposite opinion generally entertained of him, formed, I think, a conspicuous part of the character of Aristophanes, displays itself here but rarely-he had set his all upon a cast, and the danger he was running evidently sits. heavy upon his mind. His Chorus, who are generally to his plays what the female faces have been observed to be to the pieces of Hogarth, a means of keeping the acrimonious feelings within the limits of legitimately pleasureable sensation, here assume a ferocity of character-the poet has written their parts with gall, and armed their hands with a dagger. The German critics, whose feelings are as correct as their learning is profound, have observed the difference between the Knights of Aristophanes and his other plays. It is a struggle for life and death, says Wieland: it is a true dramatic philippic, says Schlegel.' In attacking Cleon so continually upon the point where he seemed least assailable, viz. the affair at Pylus, the poet has shown that deep knowledge of the people collectively, which forms the most considerable feature in his literary character.' It was politic to nauseate the audience with a continual recitation of the only event upon which any real notion of his capacity could be grounded. The peasant who signed the vote for the banishment of Aristeides, had no other reason for it but that he was tired of hearing him continually styled the Just.' Mr Mitchell has risen with his author. The translation of the Knights is much superior to that of the other play. Even the Iambic dialogue, though still generally heavy, is very brisk in one or two passages. We shall give a specimen or two. The following is from Scene I. in which Nicias and Demosthenes, habited as slaves, are debating on some means of overreaching Cleon. Demosthenes calls for a flask of wine to stimulate his ingenuity: Nic. A flask! thy soul is ever in thy cups: What thoughts can habit in a toper's brain? *This is representing the character of Cleon in this play as too ideal, too generic. The fact is, that Cleon seems actually to have combined in himself, all the detestable qualities enumerated in the |