ut if we exclude the satirists, what are we to do with Aristophanes?
Was he not a satirist, and in some sort also a censor? Yes; but, as it
appears to me, of a different kind, as well as in a different degree,
from any other ancient. I think it is plain that he wrote his comedies
not only to produce certain political, moral, and even literary ends,
but for the fun of the thing. I am so poor a Grecian that I have no
doubt I miss three quarters of what is most characteristic of him. But
even through the fog of the Latin on the opposite page I can make out
more or less of the true lineaments of the man. I can see that he was a
master of language, for it becomes alive under his hands--puts forth
buds and blossoms like the staff of Joseph, as it does always when it
feels the hand and recognizes the touch of its legitimate sovereigns.
Those prodigious combinations of his are like some of the strange polyps
we hear of that seem a single organism; but cut them into as many parts
as you please, each has a life of its own and stirs with independent
being. There is nothing that words will not do for him; no service seems
too mean or too high. And then his abundance! He puts one in mind of the
definition of a competence by the only man I ever saw who had the true
flavor of Falstaff in him--"a million a minute and your expenses paid."
As Burns said of himself, "The rhymes come skelpin, rank and file." Now
they are as graceful and sinuous as water-nymphs, and now they come
tumbling head over heels, throwing somersaults, like clowns in the
circus, with a "Here we are!" I can think of nothing like it but
Rabelais, who had the same extraordinary gift of getting all the _go_
out of words. They do not merely play with words; they romp with them,
tickle them, tease them, and somehow the words seem to like it.

I dare say there may be as much fancy and fun in "The Clouds" or "The
Birds," but neither of them seems so rich to me as "The Frogs," nor does
the fun anywhere else climb so high or dwell so long in the region of
humor as here. Lucian makes Greek mythology comic, to be sure, but he
has nothing like the scene in "The Frogs," where Bacchus is terrified
with the strange outcries of a procession celebrating his own mysteries,
and of whose dithyrambic songs it is plain he can make neither head nor
tail. Here is humor of the truest metal, and, so far as we can guess,
the first example of it. Here is the true humorous contrast between the
id