as
been the means of probation; he has squandered the gifts bestowed upon
him, which should have been concentrated in the special task to which he
was summoned. He should have known--he did in fact know--that the art
which "makes grave" is higher than that which "makes grin"; his own
peculiar duty was to advance his art one step beyond his predecessors;
to create a drama which should bring into harmony the virtue of tragedy
and the virtue of comedy; to discover the poetry which

Makes wise, not grave,--and glad,
Not grinning: whereby laughter joins with tears.

Instead of making this advance he had retrograded; and it remained for a
poet of a far-off future in the far-off Kassiterides--the Tin Isle
which has Stratford at its heart--to accomplish the task on which
Aristophanes would not adventure. One way a brilliant success was
certain for Aristophanes; the other and better way failure was possible;
and he declined to make the venture of faith. It is with this sense of
self-condemnation upon him that he essays his own defence, and it is
against this sense of self-condemnation more than against the genius and
the methods of Euripides that he struggles. When towards the close of
the poem he takes in hand the psalterion, and chants in splendid strains
the story of Thamuris, who aspired and failed, as he himself will never
do, the reader is almost won over to his side. Browning, who felt the
heights and depths of the lyric genius of Aristophanes, would seem to
have resolved that in this song of "Thamuris marching," moving in
ecstasy amid the glories of an autumn morning, he would dramatically
justify his conception of the poet; and never in his youth did Browning
sing with a finer rapture of spirit. But reading what follows, the
record of the subjugation of Athens, when the Athenian people accept the
ruin of their defences as if it were but a fragment of Aristophanic
comedy, we perceive that this song, which breaks off with an uproar of
laughter, is the condemnation as well as the glory of the singer.

The translation of _Agamemnon_, the preface to which is dated "October
1st, 1877," was undertaken at the request or command of Carlyle. The
argument of the preface fails to justify Browning's method. A
translation "literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our
language" may be highly desirable; it is commonly called a "crib"; and
a crib contrived by one who is not only a scholar but a man of genius
w