opinion, if not in itself just; and we can understand his feeling at once rebuked and irritated by a contempt for the natural life which carried with it so much religious and social change.  Aristophanes was a believer in the value of conservative ideas, though not himself a slave to them.  He was also a great poet, though often very false to his poetic self.  Such a man might easily fancy that one like Euripides was untrue to the poetry, because untrue to the joyousness of existence; and that he shook even the foundations of morality by reasoning away the religious conceptions which were bound up with natural joys.  The impression we receive from Aristophanes’ Apology is that he is defending something which he believes to be true, though conscious of defending it by sophistical arguments, and of having enforced it by very doubtful deeds; and we also feel that from his point of view, and saving his apparent inconsistencies, Mr. Browning is in sympathy with him.  At the same time, Balaustion’s rejoinder is unanswerable, as it is meant to be; and the double monologue distinguishes itself from others of the same group, by being not only more dramatic and more emotional, but also more conclusive; it is the only one of them in which the question raised is not, in some degree, left open.

The poem bristles with local allusions and illustrations which puzzle the non-classical reader.  I add an explanatory index to some names of things and persons which have not occurred in my brief outline of it.

Vol. xiii. p. 4. Kore. (Virgin.) Name given to Persephonee.  In Latin, Proserpina.

P. 6. Dikast and Heliast. Dicast=Judge, Heliast=Juryman, in Athens.

P. 7. 1. Kordax-step. 2. Propulaia. (Propylaia.) 1.  An indecent dance. 2.  Gateway of the Acropolis. 3. Pnux. (Pnyx.) 4. Bema. 3.  Place for the Popular Assembly. 4.  Place whence speeches were made.

P. 8 Makaria. Heroine in a play of Euripides, who killed herself for her country’s sake.

P. 10. 1. Milesian smart-place. 2. Phrunikos. (Phrynicus.) 1.  The painful remembrance of the capture of Miletus. 2.  A dramatic poet, who made this capture the subject of a tragedy, “which, when performed (493), so painfully wrung the feelings of the Athenian audience that they burst into tears in the theatre, and the poet was condemned to pay a fine of 1,000 drachmai, as having recalled to them their own misfortunes."[52] He is derided by Aristophanes in the “Frogs” for his method of introducing his characters.

P. 12. Amphitheos, Deity, and Dung. A character in the Acharnians of Aristophanes—­“not a god, and yet immortal.”

P. 14. 1. Diaulos. 2. Stade. 1.  A double line of the Race-course. 2.  The Stadium, on reaching which, the runner went back again.

P. 16. City of Gapers. Nickname of Athens, from the curiosity of its inhabitants.