ter moments, forgetting his failings and exigencies, he disowns
expedients unworthy of the comic art. He says he has not like
"Phrynicus, Lycis, and Amisias" introduced slaves groaning beneath their
burdens, or yelping from their stripes; he comes away, "a year older
from hearing such stage tricks." "It is not becoming," he observes in
another place for a dramatic poet to throw figs and sweetmeats to the
spectators to force a laugh, and "we have not two slaves throwing nuts
from a basket." In _his_ plays "the old man does not belabour the person
next him with a stick." He claims that he has made his rivals give up
scoffing at rags and lice, and that he does not indulge in what I have
termed optical humour. He has not, like some of his contemporaries,
"jeered at the bald head," and not danced the Cordax. He seems in the
following passage even to despise animal illustrations--

_Bdelycleon._ Tell me no fables, but domestic stories about men.

_Philocleon._ Then I know that very domestic story, "Once on a time
there was a mouse and a weazel."

_Bdel._ "Oh, thou lubberly and ignorant fellow," as Theogenes said
when he was abusing the scavenger. Are you going to tell a story of
mice and weazels among men?

Like most humorists he blames in one place what he adopts in another.

Plato had so high an opinion of Aristophanes that, in reply to Dionysius
of Syracuse, he sent him a copy of his plays as affording the best
picture of the commonwealth of Athens. This philosopher is also said to
have introduced mimes--a sort of minor comedy--from Sicily, and to have
esteemed their composer Sophron so highly that he kept a copy of his
works under his pillow. Plato appreciated humour, was fond of writing
little amatory couplets, and among the epigrams attributed to him is the
following dedication of a mirror by a fading beauty, thus rendered by
Prior:--

"Venus, take this votive glass,
Since I am not what I was!
What I shall hereafter be,
Venus, let me never see!"

Plato objected to violent laughter as indicative of an impulsive and
ill-regulated temper, observing "that it is not suitable for men of
worth, much less for the gods," the first part of which remark shows
that he was not emotional, and the second that a great improvement in
critical taste had taken place since the early centuries of Homer and
David.

As youth is romantic, and old age humorous, so in history sentiment
precedes