treatment.  Such a comedy almost of necessity rejected the lyrical element in the older comedy—­the chorus—­and confined itself from the first to conversation, or at most recitation; it was devoid not of the political element only, but of all true passion and of all poetical elevation.  The pieces judiciously made no pretence to any grand or really poetical effect:  their charm resided primarily in furnishing occupation for the intellect, not only through their subject-matter —­in which respect the newer comedy was distinguished from the old as much by the greater intrinsic emptiness as by the greater outward complication of the plot—­but more especially through their execution in detail, in which the point and polish of the conversation more particularly formed the triumph of the poet and the delight of the audience.  Complications and confusions of one person with another, which very readily allowed scope for extravagant, often licentious, practical jokes—­as in the -Casina-, which winds up in genuine Falstaffian style with the retiring of the two bridegrooms and of the soldier dressed up as bride—­jests, drolleries, and riddles, which in fact for want of real conversation furnished the staple materials of entertainment at the Attic table of the period, fill up a large portion of these comedies.  The authors of them wrote not like Eupolis and Aristophanes for a great nation, but rather for a cultivated society which spent its time, like other clever circles whose cleverness finds little fit scope for action, in guessing riddles and playing at charades.  They give us, therefore, no picture of their times; of the great historical and intellectual movements of the age no trace appears in these comedies, and we need to recall, in order to realize, the fact that Philemon and Menander were really contemporaries of Alexander and Aristotle.  But they give us a picture, equally elegant and faithful, of that refined Attic society beyond the circles of which comedy never travels.  Even in the dim Latin copy, through which we chiefly know it, the grace of the original is not wholly obliterated; and more especially in the pieces which are imitated from Menander, the most talented of these poets, the life which the poet saw and shared is delicately reflected not so much in its aberrations and distortions as in its amiable every day course.  The friendly domestic relations between father and daughter, husband and wife, master and servant, with their love-affairs and other little critical incidents, are portrayed with so broad a truthfulness, that even now they do not miss their effect:  the servants’ feast, for instance, with which the -Stichus- concludes is, in the limited range of its relations and the harmony of the two lovers and the one sweetheart, of unsurpassed gracefulness in its kind.  The elegant grisettes, who make their appearance perfumed and adorned, with their hair fashionably dressed and in variegated, gold-embroidered, sweeping robes, or even perform their toilette on the