and the train of choruses* too much given to abuse: so that the poets saw themselves reduced to the necessity of bringing imaginary names and subjects upon the stage, which at once purified and enriched the theatre; for comedy from that time was no longer a fury armed with torches, but a pleasing and innocent mirror of human life.

Chacun peint avec art dans ce nouveau miroir
S'y vit avec plaisir, ou crut ne s'y pas voir!
L'avare des premiers rit du tableau fidelle
D'un avare souvent tracé sour son modelle;
Et mille fois un fat finement exprimé
Méconnut le portrait sur lui-même formé†.

The comedy of Menander and Terence is, in propriety of speech, the fine comedy. I do not repeat all this after so many writers but just to recall it to memory, and to add to what they have said, something which they have omitted, a singular effect of publick edicts appearing in the successive progress of the art. A naked history of poets and of poetry, such as has been often given, is a mere body without soul, unless it be enlivened with an account of the birth, progress, and perfection of the art, and of the causes by which they were produced.

VI. To omit nothing essential which concerns this part, we shall say a word of the Latin The Latin comedy. When the arts passed from comedy. Greece to Rome, comedy took its turn among the rest: but the Romans applied themselves only to the new species, without chorus or personal abuse;

* Perhaps the chorus was forbid in the middle age of the comedy. Platonius seems to say so.

+ Despreaux Art. Poet. chant. 8.

though perhaps they might have played some translations of the old or the middle comedy, for Pliny gives an account of one which was represented in his own time. But the Roman comedy, which was modelled upon the last species of the Greek, hath nevertheless its different ages, according as its authors were rough or polished. The pieces of Livius Andronicus*, more ancient and less refined than those of the writers who learned the art from him, may be said to compose the first age, or the old Roman comedy and tragedy. To him you must join Nevius his contemporary, and Ennius, who lived some years after him. The second age comprises Pacuvius, Cecilius, Accius, and Plautus, unless it shall be thought better to reckon Plautus with Terence, to make the third and highest age of the Latin comedy, which may properly be called the new comedy, especially with regard to Terence, who was the friend of Lelius, and the faithful copier of Menander.

But the Romans, without troubling themselves with this order of succession, distinguished their comedies by the dresses of the players. The robe, called prætexta, with large borders of purple, being the formal dress of magistrates in their dignity, and in the exercise of their office, the actors, who had this dress, gave its name to the comedy. This is the same with that called Trabeatat, from Trabea, the dress of the consuls in peace, and the generals in triumph. The second species intro

* The year of Rome 514, the first year of the 135th Olympiad. † Prætexta, Togatæ, Tabernariæ.

Suet. de Claris Grammat. says, that C. Gelissus, librarian to Augustus, was the author of it.

duced the senators not in great offices, but as private men; this was called Togata, from Toga. The last species was named Tabernaria, from the tunick, or the common dress of the people, or rather from the mean houses which were painted on the scene. There is no need of mentioning the farces, which took their name and original from Atella, an ancient town of Campania in Italy, because they differed from the low comedy only by greater licentiousness; nor of those which were called Palliates, from the Greek, a cloak, in which the Greek characters were dressed upon the Roman stage, because that habit only distinguished the nation, not the dignity or character, like those which have been mentioned before. To say truth, these are but trifling distinctions; for, as we shall show in the following pages, comedy may be more usefully and judiciously distinguished, by the general nature of its subjects. As to the Romans, whether they had, or had not, reason for these names, they have left us so little upon the subject which is come down to us, that we need not trouble ourselves with a distinction which affords us no solid satisfaction. Plautus and Terence, the only authors of whom we are in possession, give us a fuller notion of the real nature of their comedy, with respect at least to their own times, than can be received from names and terms, from which we have no real exemplification.

whom we can The Greek comedy is reduced

VII. Not to go too far out of our way, let us return to Aristophanes, the only poet in now find the Greek comedy. He is the single writer, whom the violence of time has in some degree spared,

only to Aristo

phanes.

after having buried in darkness, and almost in forgetfulness, so many great men, of whom we have nothing but the names and a few fragments, and such slight memorials as are scarcely sufficient to defend them against the enemies of the honour of antiquity; yet these memorials are like the last glimmer of the setting sun, which scarce affords us a weak and fading light: yet from this glimmer we must endeavour to collect rays of sufficient strength to form a picture of the Greek comedy approaching as near as possible to the truth.

Of the personal character of Aristophanes little is known; what account we can give of it must therefore be had from his comedies. It can scarcely be said with certainty of what country he was: the invectives of his enemies so often called in question his qualification as a citizen, that they have made it doubtful. Some said, he was of Rhodes, others of Egena, a little island in the neighbourhood, and all agreed that he was a stranger. As to himself, he said that he was the son of Philip, and born in the Cydathenian quarter; but he confessed that some of his fortune was in Egena, which was probably the original seat of his family. He was, however, formally declared a citizen of Athens, upon evidence, whether good or bad, upon a decisive judgment, and this for having made his judges merry by an application of a saying of Telemachus*, of which this is the sense: "I am, as my "mother tells me, the son of Philip; for my own

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part, I know little of the matter, for what child "knows his own father?" This piece of merriment

* Homer, Odyssey.

did him as much good, as Archias received from the oration of Cicero*, who said that that poet vas a Roman citizen. An honour which, if he had not inherited by birth, he deserved for his genius.

Aristophanes flourished in the age of the great men of Greece, particularly of Socrates and Euripides, both of whom he outlived. He made a great figure during the whole Peloponnesian war, not merely as a comick poet by whom the people were diverted, but as the censor of the government, as a man kept in pay by the state to reform it, and almost to act the part of the arbitrator of the publick. A particular account of his comedies will best let us into his personal character as a poet, and into the nature of his genius, which is what we are most interested to know. It will, however, not be amiss to prepossess our readers a little by the judgments that had been passed upon him by the criticks of our own time, without forgetting one of the ancients that deserves great respect. VIII. "Aristophanes," says father Rapin, " is not exact in the contrivance "of his fables; his fictions are not pro"bable; he brings real characters upon the stage "too coarsely and too openly. Socrates, whom he "ridicules so much in his plays, had a more deli"cate turn of burlesque than himself, and had his "merriment without his impudence. It is true, "that Aristophanes wrote amidst the confusion and "licentiousness of the old comedy, and he was well

* Orat. pro Archia Poeta.

Aristophanes censured and praised.

+ In the 85th year of the Olympiad, 437 before our Æra, and 317 of the foundation of Rome.