from every quarter, for the fair Agariste was heiress to great possessions.  Among them was one Hippocleides, an Athenian, who proved himself far superior to all the rest in music and dissertation.  Afterwards, when the trial was over, desiring to indulge his feelings of triumph and show his skill, he called for a piper, and then for a table, upon which he danced, finishing up by standing on his head and kicking his legs about.  Cleisthenes, who was apparently one of the “old school,” and did not appreciate the manners and customs of young Athens, was much offended by this undignified performance of his would-be son-in-law, and when he at last saw him standing on his head, could no longer contain himself, but cried out, “Son of Tisander, thou hast danced away thy marriage.”  To which the other replied with characteristic unconcern:  “It’s all the same to Hippocleides,”—­an expression which became proverbial.  In this story we see the new conception of humour, though of a rude kind, coming into collision with the old philosophic contests of ingenuity, which it was destined to survive if not to supersede.

We have another curious instance about this date of an earnest-minded man being above the humour of the day, (which, no doubt, consisted principally of gesticulation), and he was probably voted an unsociable, old-fashioned fellow.  Anacharsis, the great Scythian philosopher, when jesters were introduced into his company maintained his gravity, but when afterwards a monkey was brought in, he burst into a fit of laughter, and said, “Now this is laughable by Nature; the other by Art.”  That amusement should be thus excited by natural objects denotes a very eccentric or primitive perception of the ludicrous, seldom now found among mature persons, but it is such as Diodorus, quoting no doubt from earlier histories, attributed to Osiris—­“to whom,” he says, “when in Ethiopia, they brought Satyrs, (who have hair on their backs,) for he was fond of what was laughable.”

But a further development of humour was in progress.  As people were at that time easily induced to regard sufferings as ludicrous, the idea suggested itself of creating mirth by administering punishment, or by indulging in threats and gross aspersions.  A very slight amount of invention or complexity was here necessary.  The origin of the comic drama furnishes an illustration of this.  It commenced in the harvest homes of Greece and Sicily—­in the festivals of the grape-gatherers at the completion of the vintage.  They paraded the villages, crowned with vine-leaves, carrying poles and branches, and smeared with the juice of grapes.  Their aim was to provoke general merriment by dancing, singing, and grotesque attitudes, and by giving rein to their coarse and pugnacious propensities.  Spectators and passers by were assailed with invectives, pelted with missiles, and treated to all that hostile humour which is associated with practical joking.  So vile was their language and conduct that “comedy”