ere to be matched for tenderness. But the
condition of honest women in his day did not permit of the freedom of
action and fencing dialectic of a Celimene, and consequently it is below
our mark of pure Comedy.

Sainte-Beuve conjures up the ghost of Menander, saying: For the love of
me love Terence. It is through love of Terence that moderns are able to
love Menander; and what is preserved of Terence has not apparently given
us the best of the friend of Epicurus. [Greek text] the lover taken in
horror, and [Greek text] the damsel shorn of her locks, have a promising
sound for scenes of jealousy and a too masterful display of lordly
authority, leading to regrets, of the kind known to intemperate men who
imagined they were fighting with the weaker, as the fragments indicate.

Of the six comedies of Terence, four are derived from Menander; two, the
Hecyra and the Phormio, from Apollodorus. These two are inferior in
comic action and the peculiar sweetness of Menander to the Andria, the
Adelphi, the Heautontimorumenus, and the Eunuchus: but Phormio is a more
dashing and amusing convivial parasite than the Gnatho of the last-named
comedy. There were numerous rivals of whom we know next to
nothing--except by the quotations of Athenaeus and Plutarch, and the
Greek grammarians who cited them to support a dictum--in this as in the
preceding periods of comedy in Athens, for Menander's plays are counted
by many scores, and they were crowned by the prize only eight times. The
favourite poet with critics, in Greece as in Rome, was Menander; and if
some of his rivals here and there surpassed him in comic force, and out-
stripped him in competition by an appositeness to the occasion that had
previously in the same way deprived the genius of Aristophanes of its due
reward in Clouds and Birds, 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, f