down to the shades, to bring back to Athens, beggared of poets and unable to live without them, the best poet that could be found below. It is hard to imagine anything more pathetic than an Athenian audience listening, at just that time, to that comedy in the theatre of Dionysus; in view of the sea over which their empire was even then on its last trial; surrounded by the monuments of an empire over art which had already declined—in the building, at once theatre and temple, which the imagination of the poets lately dead had long peopled with the divine or heroic shapes known to them and their fathers, but in which, they might well forebode, the living inspiration of the god would never be so shown forth again.
The interest of the comedy does not depend, however, merely on its character of epilogue to a school of tragic drama so masterly, of so short an actual life, of so perpetual an influence; it takes another kind of interest from the justness of its implicit criticism; the criticism of a man whose wit would not have borne the test of centuries and the harder test of translation, if he had not joined to a quick fancy the qualities which make a first-rate critic.
When Dionysus reaches the lower world, an uproar is being raised among the dead. It has been the custom that the throne of Tragedy, next to Pluto's own, shall be held by a laureate for the time being, subject to removal on the coming of a better. For some time Æschylus has held the
