80 SPECIMENS OF L'ATIN COMEDY. 



whole. Never was a Roman mind so peopled with all the images of 

 beauty, or possessed of that internal harmony and fitness of concep- 

 tion, which enabled the author of the Iliad to transcribe into his 

 poem the [.music of his soul. Greece, therefore, " meet nurse for a 

 poetic child/' produced a perfect model of the wowng, to whom, if 

 Christianity denies the honours of an apotheosis, we may yet be war- 

 ranted in attributing a " human intellect divine." 



But is this, it may be said, to the point ? we reply, it is : and our 

 design in this rapsodical exordium is to account for the illiterate cha- 

 racter of the comedies of Plautus, compared with those of Aristo- 

 phanes, which is so great as at first sight to create surprise ; and we 

 could not give a better index to the character of the two people than 

 in the works of these dramatists. The Athenian requires of his readers 

 not only an elegant taste to relish the beauties of the play, but an accu- 

 rate knowledge of philosophy, as well as of the history and general lite- 

 rature of the country to understand his meaning and allusions ; while 

 in the other case, man need only possess the physical powers and affec- 

 tive propensities common to all mankind, to be enabled fully to appre- 

 ciate the merits of the performance. The comedies of the one are the 

 production of a most literary people in their most literary epoch, and 

 those of the other, of a most warlike people in their most illiterate age. 

 Aristophanes may be said to have been formed by the times, while 

 Plautus rather gave the colour to his age. And though, with Horace,* 

 we may hesitate to ascribe to comedy the divine name of poetry,f and 

 to class under the same head the bellant raciness of Plautus and the 

 linked sweetness of the Homeric verse, we cannot deny considerable 

 praise to one, who may be called the modelist of the Latin language, 

 or refuse him the merit of skill in the delineation of character, and 

 command over the best resources of fiction. But it must always be 

 remembered that, like the corruptions and abbreviations of language, 

 the taste for the drama invariably ascends from the lo^r to the 

 higher circles of society ; first cultivated by the vulgar, it attracts 

 the notice of the class next above, and so proceeds by degrees, till in 

 the ample range of its varied and diversified circles, it includes the 

 whole civilized community. This will account for many of the ap- 

 parent inconsistences, which we find in the plays ; as, for instance, 

 the Aulularia, the prologue is pronounced by the Lar, or household 

 god. Though men in the higher classes of society at Rome were 

 perfectly aware of the inconsistency and absurdity of unnecessarily 



* Sat. I. 3. 45. <f I deireo quidam, comcedia necne poema 



Esset, qusesivere." 



j- The word poet literally means a maker ; from KOUW to make : and the 

 English word maker is in the sense of poet by Spencer and Chaucer, as well as 

 the verb to make, meaning to write poetry (corresponding to the use of wo^y, 

 Lysius, Orat. Funeb. I. c.) 

 Thus Spencer, Eclog. 4. * What is he for a lad you so lament ? 



Is love such pinching pain to them that prove ?, 

 And hath he skill to make so excellent, 



Yet hath such little skill to bridle love ?" 



So that the poet par excellence is not only an imitator of nature, but a creator of 

 that which, though beyond, is not inconsistent with, nature ; as Shakespeare in 

 the ghost of Hamlet. 



