Balaustion and her husband, seeing the sober mood return, once more welcome “the glory of Aristophanes” to their house, and bid him on his side share in their solemnity, and commemorate Euripides with them.  This calls his attention to the portrait of the dead poet; those implements of his work which were his tokens of friendship to Balaustion; the papyrus leaf inscribed with the Herakles itself; and he cannot resist a sneer at this again unsuccessful play.  His hostess rebukes him grandly for completing the long outrage on the living man by this petty attack on his “supreme calm;” and as supreme calmness means death, he begins musing on the immunities which death confers, and their injustice.  “Give him only time and he will pulverize his opponents; he will show them whether this work of his is unintelligible, or that other will not live.  But let them die; and they slink out of his reach with their malice, stupidity, and ignorance, while survivors croak ‘respect the dead’ over the hole in which they are laid.  At all events, he retorts on them when he can—­unwisely perhaps, since those he flings mud at are only immortalized by the process.  Euripides knew better than to follow his example.”

Again Balaustion has her answer.  “He has volleyed mud at Euripides himself while pretending to defend the same cause:  the cause of art, of knowledge, of justice, and of truth;” and she makes his cheek burn by reminding him of what petty and what ignoble witticisms that mud was made up.  At last he begins in real earnest.  “Balaustion, he understands, condemns comedy both in theory and in practice, from the calm and rational heights to which she, with her tragic friend, has attained.  Here are his arguments in its favour.”

“It claims respect as an institution, because as such it is coeval with liberty—­born of the feast of Bacchus, and therefore of the good gifts of the earth—­a mode of telling truth without punishment, and of chastising without doing harm.  It claims respect by its advance from simple objects to more composite, from plain thumping to more searching modes of attack.  The men who once exposed wrong-doing by shouting it before the wrong-doer’s door, now expose it by representing its various forms.  The comic poets denounce not only the thief, the fool, the miser, but the advocates of war, the flatterers of the populace, the sophists who set up Whirligig[42] in the place of Zeus, the thin-blooded tragedian in league with the sophists, who preaches against the flesh.  Where facts are insufficient he has recourse to fancy, and exaggerates the wronged truth the more strongly to enforce it (here follows a characteristic illustration.) To those who call Saperdion the Empousa, he shows her in a Kimberic robe;[43] in other words, he exposes her charms more fully than she does it herself, the better to convict those who malign them.”