denly
In all the grand investiture of death,
Bowing your knee beside my lowly head--
Equals one moment!" (vol. xiii. p. 144.)

Then she bids him "arise and go." Both have done homage to Euripides.

"Not so," he replies; "their discussion is not at an end. She has
defended Euripides obliquely by attacking himself. Let her do it in a
more direct fashion." This leads up to what seems to her the best
defence possible: that reading of the "Herakles" which the entrance of
Aristophanes had suspended. Its closing lines set Aristophanes musing.
The chorus has said:

"The greatest of all our friends of yore,
We have lost for evermore!" (p. 231.)

"Who," he asks, "has been Athens' best friend? He who attracted her by
the charm of his art, or he who repelled her by its severity?" He
answers this by describing the relative positions of himself and
Euripides in an image suggested by the popular game of Cottabos.[49]
"The one was fixed within his 'globe;' the other adapted himself to its
rotations. Euripides received his views of life through a single
aperture, the one channel of 'High' and 'Right.' Aristophanes has
welcomed also the opposite impressions of 'Low' and 'Wrong,' and
reproduced all in their turn. Some poet of the future, born perhaps in
those Cassiterides, may defy the mechanics of the case, and place
himself in such a position as to see high and low at once--be Tragic and
Comic at the same time. But he meanwhile has been Athens' best
friend--her wisest also--since he has not challenged failure by
attempting what he could not perform. He has not risked the fate of
Thamyris, who was punished for having striven with the higher powers, as
if his vision had been equal to their own."[50] And he recites a
fragment of song, which Mr. Browning unfortunately has not completed,
describing the fiery rapture in which that poet marched, all
unconscious, to his doom. Some laughing promise and prophecy ensues, and
Aristophanes departs, in the 'rose-streaked morning grey,' bidding the
couple farewell till the coming year.

That year has come and gone. Sophocles has died: and Aristophanes has
attained his final triumph in the "Frogs"--a play flashing with every
variety of his genius--as softly musical in the mystics' chorus as
croaking in that of the frogs--in which Bacchus himself is ridiculed,
and Euripides is more coarsely handled than ever. And once more the
v