Welsh. But the question of the affinities of language is not one to be discussed here.
The remaining Comedies may be dismissed with brief notice. The stock characters—the parasite, the military swaggerer, and the cunning slave—reappear upon the stage in very similar combinations, and in less respectable company. 'Stichus,' which is in other respects deficient in interest, having no plot whatever, and which some authorities do not consider to have been written by Plautus, deserves notice as containing the pretty female character of Pamphila (or Pinacium, as she is called in some copies), the exemplary young wife who maintains her fidelity to her absent husband in spite of the strong probabilities of his death or desertion. In vain has her father urged upon her and his other daughter, in accordance, no doubt, with the feeling of society on such points, the propriety of unprotected young women in their circumstances marrying again. Their husbands have now been absent, ostensibly on a trading voyage, for above three years, and have sent no word home. But Pamphila will listen to no such suggestion, and encourages her sister in steady resistance to all temptations to such breach of their first vows. Of course both husbands return home in due time, enriched by the profits made in their foreign voyages; and such is the whole story of this brief and inartistic drama, remarkable only for its pleasant companion pictures of the two young wives. Six more plays make up the list of Plautus's surviving comedies, and if
