and Shakspeare in his “Comedy of Errors.”  Lessing pronounces the “Captivi” to be the finest comedy ever brought upon the stage; he translated this play into German, and it has also been admirably translated into English.  The great excellence of Plautus was the masterly handling of language, and the adjusting the parts for dramatic effect.  His humor, broad and fresh, produced irresistible comic effects.  No one ever surpassed him in his vocabulary of nicknames and his happy jokes.  Hence he maintained his popularity in spite of his vulgarity.

Terence shares with Plautus the throne of Roman comedy.  He was a Carthaginian slave, born 185 B.C., but was educated by a wealthy Roman into whose hands he fell, and ever after associated with the best society and travelled extensively in Greece.  He was greatly inferior to Plautus in originality, and has not exerted a like lasting influence; but he wrote comedies characterized by great purity of diction, which have been translated into all modern languages.  Terence, whom Mommsen regards as the most polished, elegant, and chaste of all the poets of the newer comedy, closely copied the Greek Menander.  Unlike Plautus, he drew his characters from good society, and his comedies, if not moral, were decent.  Plautus wrote for the multitude, Terence for the few; Plautus delighted in noisy dialogue and slang expressions; Terence confined himself to quiet conversation and elegant expressions, for which he was admired by Cicero and Quintilian and other great critics.  He aspired to the approval of the cultivated, rather than the applause of the vulgar; and it is a remarkable fact that his comedies supplanted the more original productions of Plautus in the later years of the republic, showing that the literature of the aristocracy was more prized than that of the people, even in a degenerate age.

The “Thyestes” of Varius was regarded in its day as equal to Greek tragedies.  Ennius composed tragedies in a vigorous style, and was regarded by the Romans as the parent of their literature, although most of his works have perished.  Virgil borrowed many of his thoughts, and was regarded as the prince of Roman song in the time of Cicero.  The Latin language is greatly indebted to him.  Pacuvius imitated Aeschylus in the loftiness of his style.  From the times before the Augustan age no tragic production has reached us, although Quintilian speaks highly of Accius, especially of the vigor of his style; but he merely imitated the Greeks.  The only tragedy of the Romans which has reached us was written by Seneca the philosopher.

In epic poetry the Romans accomplished more, though even here they are still inferior to the Greeks.  The Aeneid of Virgil has certainly survived the material glories of Rome.  It may not have come up to the exalted ideal of its author; it may be defaced by political flatteries; it may not have the force and originality of the Iliad,—­but it is superior in art, and delineates the passion of love with more delicacy