Was never nursed by temperance or health. 
      But huge the eyeballs rolled black 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,
      These 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, recognized the conqueror. 
      Impudent and majestic:  drunk, perhaps,
      But that’s religion; sense too plainly snuffed: 
      Still, sensuality was grown a rite.”

He, too, has just heard of Euripides’ death, and an impulse, part sympathy, part mockery, has brought him to the “house friendly to Euripides.”  The revellers retire abashed before Balaustion; he alone remains.  From the extraordinary and only too natural gabble and garbage of his opening words, he quickly passes to a more or less serious explanation and defence of his conduct toward the dead poet; to an exposition, in fact, of his aims and doings as a writer of comedy.  When his “apology” is ended, Balaustion replies, censuring him pretty severely, making adroit use of the licence of a “stranger” and a woman, and defending Euripides against him.  For a further (and the best) defence, she reads the whole of the Herakles, which Browning here translates.  Aristophanes, naturally, is not convinced; impressed he must have been, to have borne so long a reading without demur:  he flings them a snatch of song, finding in his impromptu a hint for a new play, the Frogs, and is gone.  And now, a year after, as the couple return to Rhodes from a disgraced and dismantled Athens, Balaustion dictates to Euthukles her recollection of the “adventure,” for the double purpose of putting the past events on record, and of eluding the urgency of the present sorrow.

It will thus be seen that the book consists of two distinct parts.  There is, first, the apology of Aristophanes, second, the translation of the play of Euripides. Herakles, or, as it is more generally known, Hercules Furens, is rendered completely and consecutively, in blank verse and varied choric measures.  It is not, as was the case with Alkestis worked into the body of the poem; not welded, but inserted.  We have thus, while losing the commentary, the advantage of a detached transcript, with a lyrical rendering of the lyrical parts of the play.  These are given with a constant vigour and closeness, often with a rare beauty (as in the famous “Ode bewailing Age,” and that other on the labours of Herakles).  Precisely the same characteristics that we have found in the translation of the Alkestis are here again to be found, and all that I said on the former, considered apart from its setting, may be applied to the latter.  We have the same literalness (again with a few apparent exceptions), the same insistence on the root-meaning of words, the same graphic force and vivifying touch, the same general clearness and charm.