his position as chief of the comic poets of his age was unchallenged.  Plutarch very unnecessarily drags Aristophanes into a comparison with him, to the confusion of the older poet.  Their aims, the matter they dealt in, and the times, were quite dissimilar.  But it is no wonder that Plutarch, writing when Athenian beauty of style was the delight of his patrons, should rank Menander at the highest.  In what degree of faithfulness Terence copied Menander, whether, as he states of the passage in the Adelphi taken from Diphilus, verbum de verbo in the lovelier scenes—­the description of the last words of the dying Andrian, and of her funeral, for instance—­remains conjectural.  For us Terence shares with his master the praise of an amenity that is like Elysian speech, equable and ever gracious; like the face of the Andrian’s young sister: 

‘Adeo modesto, adeo venusto, ut nihil supra.’

The celebrated ‘flens quam familiariter,’ of which the closest rendering grounds hopelessly on harsh prose, to express the sorrowful confidingness of a young girl who has lost her sister and dearest friend, and has but her lover left to her; ’she turned and flung herself on his bosom, weeping as though at home there’:  this our instinct tells us must be Greek, though hardly finer in Greek.  Certain lines of Terence, compared with the original fragments, show that he embellished them; but his taste was too exquisite for him to do other than devote his genius to the honest translation of such pieces as the above.  Menander, then; with him, through the affinity of sympathy, Terence; and Shakespeare and Moliere have this beautiful translucency of language:  and the study of the comic poets might be recommended, if for that only.

A singular ill fate befell the writings of Menander.  What we have of him in Terence was chosen probably to please the cultivated Romans; {8} and is a romantic play with a comic intrigue, obtained in two instances, the Andria and the Eunuchus, by rolling a couple of his originals into one.  The titles of certain of the lost plays indicate the comic illumining character; a Self-pitier, a Self-chastiser, an Ill-tempered man, a Superstitious, an Incredulous, etc., point to suggestive domestic themes.

Terence forwarded manuscript translations from Greece, that suffered shipwreck; he, who could have restored the treasure, died on the way home.  The zealots of Byzantium completed the work of destruction.  So we have the four comedies of Terence, numbering six of Menander, with a few sketches of plots—­one of them, the Thesaurus, introduces a miser, whom we should have liked to contrast with Harpagon—­and a multitude of small fragments of a sententious cast, fitted for quotation.  Enough remains to make his greatness felt.