For the reasons above given, which he farther expands and illustrates, Aristophanes chooses the “meaner muse” for his exponent.  “And who, after all, is the worse for it?  Does he strangle the enemies of the truth?  No.  He simply doses them with comedy, i.e. with words.  Those who offend in words he pays back in them, exaggerating a little, but only so as to emphasize what he means; just as love and hate use each other’s terms, because those proper to themselves have grown unmeaning from constant use.  And what is the ground of difference between Balaustion and himself?  Slender enough, in all probability, as he could show her, if they were discussing the question for themselves alone.  As it is, Euripides has attacked him in the sight of the mob.  His defence is addressed to it:  he uses the arguments it can understand.  It does not follow that they convey a literal statement of his own views.  Euripides is not the only man who is free from superstition.  He too on occasion can show up the gods;” and he describes the manner in which he will do this in his next play.  All that is serious in the Apology is given in the concluding passage.  “Whomever else he is hard upon, he will level nothing worse than a harmless parody at Sophocles, for he has no grudge against him:—­

’He founds no anti-school, upsets no faith,
But, living, lets live,’ (vol. xiii. p. 110.)

And all his, Aristophanes’, teaching is this:—­

                                    ’... accept the old,
       Contest the strange! acknowledge work that’s done,
       Misdoubt men who have still their work to do!’ (p. 111.)

He has summed up his case.  Euripides must own himself beaten.  If Balaustion will not admit the defeat, let her summon her rosy strength, and do her worst against his opponent.”

Balaustion pauses for a moment before relating her answer to this challenge:  and gives us to understand that, in thus relieving her memory, she is reproducing not only this special experience, but a great deal of what she habitually thinks and feels; thus silencing any sense of the improbable, which so lengthened an argument accurately remembered, might create in the reader’s mind.

Her tone is at first deprecating.  “It is not for her, a mere mouse, to argue on a footing of equality with a forest monarch like himself.  It is not for her to criticize the means by which his genius may attain its ends.  She does not forget that the poet-class is that essentially which labours in the cause of human good.  She does not forget that she is a woman, who may recoil from methods which a man is justified in employing.  Lastly, she is a foreigner, and as such may blame many things simply because she does not understand them.  She may yet have to learn that the tree stands firm at root, though its boughs dip and dance before the wind.  She may yet have to learn that those who witness his plays have been previously braced to receive the good and reject the evil in them, like the freshly-bathed hand which passes unhurt through flame.  She may judge falsely from what she sees.”