Secondly, there is the presentation of Aristophanes.  Browning has created him for us—­

    And no ignoble presence!  On the bulge
    Of the clear baldness,—­all his head one brow,—­
    True, the veins swelled, blue network, and there surged
    A red from cheek to temple,—­then retired
    As if the dark-leaved chaplet damped a flame,—­
    Was never nursed by temperance or health. 
    But huge the eyeballs rolled back native fire,
    Imperiously triumphant:  nostrils wide
    Waited their incense; while the pursed mouth’s pout
    Aggressive, while the beak supreme above,
    While the head, face, nay, pillared throat thrown back,
    Beard whitening under like a vinous foam,
    There made a glory, of such insolence—­
    I thought,—­such domineering deity
    Hephaistos might have carved to cut the brine
    For his gay brother’s prow, imbrue that path
    Which, purpling, recognised the conqueror. 
    Impudent and majestic:  drunk, perhaps,
    But that’s religion; sense too plainly snuffed: 
    Still, sensuality was grown a rite.

We see the man, the natural man, to the life.  But as the poem goes on, we company with his intellect and soul, with the struggle of sensualism against his knowledge of a more ideal life; above all, with one, who indulging the appetites and senses of the natural man, is yet, at a moment, their master.  The coarse chambers of his nature are laid bare, his sensuous pleasure in the lower forms of human life, his joy in satirising them, his contempt for the good or the ideal life if it throw the sensual man away.  Then, we are made to know the power he has to rise above this—­without losing it—­into the higher imaginative region where, for the time, he feels the genius of Sophocles, Euripides, the moral power of Balaustion, and the beauty of the natural world.  Indeed, in that last we find him in his extant plays.  Few of the Greeks could write with greater exquisiteness of natural beauty than this wild poet who loved the dunghill.  And Browning does not say this, but records in this Apology how when Aristophanes is touched for an instant by Balaustion’s reading of the Herakles, and seizing the psalterion sings the song of Thamuris marching to his trial with the Muses through a golden autumn morning—­it is the glory and loveliness of nature that he sings.  This portraiture of the poet is scattered through the whole poem.  It is too minute, too full of detail to dwell on here.  It has a thousand touches of life and intimacy.  And it is perhaps the finest thing Browning has done in portraiture of character.  But then there was a certain sympathy in Browning for Aristophanes.  The natural man was never altogether put aside by Browning.

Lastly, there is the fresh presentation of Balaustion, of the matured and experienced woman whom we have known as a happy girl.  Euthycles and she are married, and one night, as she is sitting alone, he comes in, bringing the grave news that Euripides is dead, but had proved at the court of Archelaos of Macedonia his usefulness as counsellor to King and State, and his power still to sing—­