enemies periodically firing the land up to the gates of London, and a
Samuel Foote, of prodigious genius, attacking him with ridicule, I think
it gives a notion of the conflict engaged in by Aristophanes. This
laughing bald-pate, as he calls himself, was a Titanic pamphleteer, using
laughter for his political weapon; a laughter without scruple, the
laughter of Hercules. He was primed with wit, as with the garlic he
speaks of giving to the game-cocks, to make them fight the better. And
he was a lyric poet of aerial delicacy, with the homely song of a jolly
national poet, and a poet of such feeling that the comic mask is at times
no broader than a cloth on a face to show the serious features of our
common likeness. He is not to be revived; but if his method were
studied, some of the fire in him would come to us, and we might be
revived.

Taking them generally, the English public are most in sympathy with this
primitive Aristophanic comedy, wherein the comic is capped by the
grotesque, irony tips the wit, and satire is a naked sword. They have
the basis of the Comic in them: an esteem for common-sense. They
cordially dislike the reverse of it. They have a rich laugh, though it
is not the _gros rire_ of the Gaul tossing _gros sel_, nor the polished
Frenchman's mentally digestive laugh. And if they have now, like a
monarch with a troop of dwarfs, too many jesters kicking the dictionary
about, to let them reflect that they are dull, occasionally, like the
pensive monarch surprising himself with an idea of an idea of his own,
they look so. And they are given to looking in the glass. They must see
that something ails them. How much even the better order of them will
endure, without a thought of the defensive, when the person afflicting
them is protected from satire, we read in Memoirs of a Preceding Age,
where the vulgarly tyrannous hostess of a great house of reception
shuffled the guests and played them like a pack of cards, with her exact