ugh they are in a certain sense amiable,
it still displays them as having their origin in some dependence on our
lower nature, accompanied with a defect in true freedom of spirit and
self-subsistence, and subject to that unconnection by contradictions of
the inward being, to which all folly is owing.

The ideal of earnest poetry consists in the union and harmonious melting
down, and fusion of the sensual into the spiritual,--of man as an animal
into man as a power of reason and self-government. And this we have
represented to us most clearly in the plastic art, or statuary; where the
perfection of outward form is a symbol of the perfection of an inward
idea; where the body is wholly penetrated by the soul, and spiritualized
even to a state of glory, and like a transparent substance, the matter, in
its own nature darkness, becomes altogether a vehicle and fixture of
light, a means of developing its beauties, and unfolding its wealth of
various colours without disturbing its unity, or causing a division of the
parts. The sportive ideal, on the contrary, consists in the perfect
harmony and concord of the higher nature with the animal, as with its
ruling principle and its acknowledged regent. The understanding and
practical reason are represented as the willing slaves of the senses and
appetites, and of the passions arising out of them. Hence we may admit the
appropriateness to the old comedy, as a work of defined art, of allusions
and descriptions, which morality can never justify, and, only with
reference to the author himself, and only as being the effect or rather
the cause of the circumstances in which he wrote, can consent even to
palliate.

The old comedy rose to its perfection in Aristophanes, and in him also it
died with the freedom of Greece. Then arose a species of drama, more fitly
called dramatic entertainment than comedy, but of which, nevertheless, our
modern comedy (Shakespeare's altogether excepted) is the genuine
descendant. Euripides had already brought tragedy lower down and by many
steps nearer to the real world than his predecessors had ever done, and
the passionate admiration which Menander and Philemon expressed for him,
and their open avowals that he was their great master, entitle us to
consider their dramas as of a middle species, between tragedy and
comedy,--not the tragi-comedy, or thing of heterogeneous parts, but a
complete whole, founded on principles of its own. Throughout we find the
drama