petty and what ignoble witticisms that mud was
made up. At last he begins in real earnest. "Balaustion, he understands,
condemns comedy both in theory and in practice, from the calm and
rational heights to which she, with her tragic friend, has attained.
Here are his arguments in its favour."

"It claims respect as an institution, because as such it is coeval with
liberty--born of the feast of Bacchus, and therefore of the good gifts
of the earth--a mode of telling truth without punishment, and of
chastising without doing harm. It claims respect by its advance from
simple objects to more composite, from plain thumping to more searching
modes of attack. The men who once exposed wrong-doing by shouting it
before the wrong-doer's door, now expose it by representing its various
forms. The comic poets denounce not only the thief, the fool, the miser,
but the advocates of war, the flatterers of the populace, the sophists
who set up Whirligig[42] in the place of Zeus, the thin-blooded
tragedian in league with the sophists, who preaches against the flesh.
Where facts are insufficient he has recourse to fancy, and exaggerates
the wronged truth the more strongly to enforce it (here follows a
characteristic illustration.) To those who call Saperdion the Empousa,
he shows her in a Kimberic robe;[43] in other words, he exposes her
charms more fully than she does it herself, the better to convict those
who malign them."

And here lies his grudge against Euripides. Euripides is one of those
who call Saperdion a monster--who slander the world of sense with its
beauties and its enjoyments, or who contemptuously set it aside. "Born
on the day of Salamis--when heroes walked the earth; and gods were
reverenced and not discussed--when Greeks guarded their home with its
abundant joys, and left barbarian lands to their own starvation--he has
lived to belie every tradition of that triumphant time. He has joined
himself with a band of starved teachers and reformers to cut its very
foundations away. He exalts death over life, misery over happiness; or,
if he admits happiness, it is as an empty name."

"Moreover, he reasons away the gods; for they are, according to him,
only forms of nature. Zeus _is_ the atmosphere. Poseidon _is_ the sea.
Necessity rules the universe. Duty, once the will of the gods, is now a
voice within ourselves bidding us renounce pleasure, and giving us no
inducement to do so."

"He reasons away morality, for he shows