brought him under the law.  After the catastrophe, the poet, who had ever been gazing back at the men of Marathon and Salamis, must have felt that he had foreseen it; and that he was wise when he pleaded for peace, and derided military coxcombry, and the captious old creature Demus, we can admit.  He had the Comic poet’s gift of common-sense—­which does not always include political intelligence; yet his political tendency raised him above the Old Comedy turn for uproarious farce.  He abused Socrates, but Xenophon, the disciple of Socrates, by his trained rhetoric saved the Ten Thousand.  Aristophanes might say that if his warnings had been followed there would have been no such thing as a mercenary Greek expedition under Cyrus.  Athens, however, was on a landslip, falling; none could arrest it.  To gaze back, to uphold the old times, was a most natural conservatism, and fruitless.  The aloe had bloomed.  Whether right or wrong in his politics and his criticisms, and bearing in mind the instruments he played on and the audience he had to win, there is an idea in his comedies:  it is the Idea of Good Citizenship.

He is not likely to be revived.  He stands, like Shakespeare, an unapproachable.  Swift says of him, with a loving chuckle: 

‘But as for Comic Aristophanes, The dog too witty and too profane is.’

Aristophanes was ‘profane,’ under satiric direction, unlike his rivals Cratinus, Phrynichus, Ameipsias, Eupolis, and others, if we are to believe him, who in their extraordinary Donnybrook Fair of the day of Comedy, thumped one another and everybody else with absolute heartiness, as he did, but aimed at small game, and dragged forth particular women, which he did not.  He is an aggregate of many men, all of a certain greatness.  We may build up a conception of his powers if we mount Rabelais upon Hudibras, lift him with the songfulness of Shelley, give him a vein of Heinrich Heine, and cover him with the mantle of the Anti-Jacobin, adding (that there may be some Irish in him) a dash of Grattan, before he is in motion.

But such efforts at conceiving one great one by incorporation of minors are vain, and cry for excuse.  Supposing Wilkes for leading man in a country constantly plunging into war under some plumed Lamachus, with enemies periodically firing the land up to the gates of London, and a Samuel Foote, of prodigious genius, attacking him with ridicule, I think it gives a notion of the conflict engaged in by Aristophanes.  This laughing bald-pate, as he calls himself, was a Titanic pamphleteer, using laughter for his political weapon; a laughter without scruple, the laughter of Hercules.  He was primed with wit, as with the garlic he speaks of giving to the game-cocks, to make them fight the better.  And he was a lyric poet of aerial delicacy, with the homely song of a jolly national poet, and a poet of such feeling that the comic mask is at times no broader than a cloth on a face to show the serious features of our common likeness.  He is not to be revived; but if his method were studied, some of the fire in him would come to us, and we might be revived.