As Aristophanes wrote to please the multitude, at a time when the
licentiousness of the Athenians was boundless, his pleasantries are
coarse and impolite, his characters extravagantly forced, and
distorted with unnatural deformity, like the monstrous caricaturas of
Callot. He is full of the grossest obscenity, indecency, and
inurbanity; and as the populace always delight to hear their superiors
abused and misrepresented, he scatters the rankest calumnies on the
wisest and worthiest personages of his country. His style is unequal,
occasioned by a frequent introduction of parodies on Sophocles and
Euripides. It is, however, certain, that he abounds in artful
allusions to the state of Athens at the time when he wrote; and,
perhaps, he is more valuable, considered as a political satirist than
a writer of comedy.

Plautus has adulterated a rich vein of genuine wit and humour, with a
mixture of the basest buffoonry. No writer seems to have been born
with a more forcible or more fertile genius for comedy. He has drawn
some characters with incomparable spirit: we are indebted to him for
the first good miser, and for that worn-out character among the
Romans, a boastful Thraso. But his love degenerates into lewdness; and
his jests are insupportably low and illiberal, and fit only for "the
dregs of Romulus" to use and to hear; he has furnished examples of
every species of true and false wit, even down to a quibble and a pun.
Plautus lived in an age when the Romans were but just emerging into
politeness; and I cannot forbear thinking, that if he had been
reserved for the age of Augustus, he would have produced more perfect
plays than even the elegant disciple of Menander.

Delicacy, sweetness, and correctness, are the characteristics of