198 SWINBURA?E&amp;gt;S TRAGEDIES. 



his waxen &quot;Gebirus Rex&quot; above all the natural fruits of 

 his mind ; and we have no doubt that, if some philosopher 

 should succeed in accomplishing Paracelsus s problem of an 

 artificial homunculus, he would dote on this misbegotten 

 babe of his science, and think him the only genius of the 

 family. We cannot over-estimate the value of some of the 

 ancient classics, but a certain amount of superstition about 

 Greek and Latin has come down to us from the revival of 

 learning, and seems to hold in mortmain the intellects of 

 whoever has, at some time, got a smattering of them. 

 Men quote a platitude in either of those tongues with a 

 relish of conviction as droll to the uninitiated as the knight 

 hood of freemasonry. Horace Walpole s nephew, the Earl 

 of Orford, when he was in his cups, used to have Statius 

 read aloud to him every night for two hours by a tipsy 

 tradesman, whose hiccupings threw in here and there a 

 kind of csesural pause, and found some strange mystery of 

 sweetness in the disquantitied syllables. So powerful is 

 this hallucination that we can conceive of festina lente as 

 the favourite maxim of a Mississippi steamboat captain, 

 and apurrov plv vSup cited as conclusive by a gentleman for 

 whom the -bottle before him reversed the wonder of the 

 stereoscope, and substituted the Gascon v for the b in 

 binocular. 



Something of this singular superstition has infected the 

 minds of those who confound the laws of conventional 

 limitation which governed the practice of Greek authors in 

 dramatic composition laws adapted to the habits and 

 traditions and preconceptions of their audience with that 

 sense of ideal form which made the Greeks masters in art 

 to all succeeding generations. Aristophanes is beyond 

 question the highest type of pure comedy, etherealising 

 his humour by the infusion, or intensifying it by the 

 contrast of poetry, and deodorising the personality of his 

 sarcasm by a sprinkle from the clearest springs of fancy. 

 His satire, aimed as it was at typical characteristics, is as 

 fresh as ever ; but we doubt whether an Aristophanic 

 drama, retaining its exact form, but adapted to present 



