Thais of the Eunuchus of Terence is neither professionally
attractive nor repulsive; his picture of the two Andrians, Chrysis

and her sister, is nowhere to be matched for tenderness. But the
condition of honest women in his day did not permit of the freedom

of action and fencing dialectic of a Celimene, and consequently it
is below our mark of pure Comedy.

Sainte-Beuve conjures up the ghost of Menander, saying: For the
love of me love Terence. It is through love of Terence that moderns

are able to love Menander; and what is preserved of Terence has not
apparently given us the best of the friend of Epicurus. [Greek text

which cannot be reproduced] the lover taken in horror, and [Greek
text] the damsel shorn of her locks, have a promising sound for

scenes of jealousy and a too masterful display of lordly authority,
leading to regrets, of the kind known to intemperate men who

imagined they were fighting with the weaker, as the fragments
indicate.

Of the six comedies of Terence, four are derived from Menander; two,
the Hecyra and the Phormio, from Apollodorus. These two are

inferior in comic action and the peculiarsweetness of Menander to
the Andria, the Adelphi, the Heautontimorumenus, and the Eunuchus:

but Phormio is a more dashing and amusing convivial parasite than
the Gnatho of the last-named comedy. There were numerous rivals of

whom we know next to nothing--except by the quotations of Athenaeus
and Plutarch, and the Greek grammarians who cited them to support a

dictum--in this as in the preceding periods of comedy in Athens, for
Menander's plays are counted by many scores, and they were crowned

by the prize only eight times. The favourite poet with critics, in
Greece as in Rome, was Menander; and if some of his rivals here and

there surpassed him in comic force, and out-stripped him in
competition by an appositeness to the occasion that had previously

in the same way deprived the genius of Aristophanes of its due
reward in Clouds and Birds, his position as chief of the comic poets

of his age was unchallenged. Plutarch very unnecessarily drags
Aristophanes into a comparison with him, to the confusion of the

older poet. Their aims, the matter they dealt in, and the times,
were quite dissimilar. But it is no wonder that Plutarch, writing

when Athenian beauty of style was the delight of his patrons, should
rank Menander at the highest. In what degree of faithfulness

Terence copied Menander, whether, as he states of the passage in the
Adelphi taken from Diphilus, verbum de verbo in the lovelier scenes-

- the description of the last words of the dying Andrian, and of her
funeral, for instance--remains conjectural. For us Terence shares

with his master the praise of an amenity that is like Elysian
speech, equable and ever gracious; like the face of the Andrian's

young sister:
'Adeo modesto, adeo venusto, ut nihil supra.'

The celebrated 'flens quam familiariter,' of which the closest
rendering grounds hopelessly on harsh prose, to express the

sorrowful confidingness of a young girl who has lost her sister and
dearest friend, and has but her lover left to her; 'she turned and

flung herself on his bosom, weeping as though at home there': this
our instinct tells us must be Greek, though hardly finer in Greek.

Certain lines of Terence, compared with the original fragments, show
that he embellished them; but his taste was too exquisite for him to

do other than devote his genius to the honest translation of such
pieces as the above. Menander, then; with him, through the affinity

of sympathy, Terence; and Shakespeare and Moliere have this
beautiful translucency of language: and the study of the comic

poets might be recommended, if for that only.
A singular ill fate befell the writings of Menander. What we have

of him in Terence was chosen probably to please the cultivated
Romans; {8} and is a romantic play with a comic intrigue, obtained

in two instances, the Andria and the Eunuchus, by rolling a couple
of his originals into one. The titles of certain of the lost plays

indicate the comic illumining character; a Self-pitier, a Self-
chastiser, an Ill-tempered man, a Superstitious, an Incredulous,

etc., point to suggestivedomestic themes.
Terence forwarded manuscripttranslations from Greece, that suffered

shipwreck; he, who could have restored the treasure, died on the way
home. The zealots of Byzantium completed the work of destruction.

So we have the four comedies of Terence, numbering six of Menander,
with a few sketches of plots--one of them, the Thesaurus, introduces

a miser, whom we should have liked to contrast with Harpagon--and a
multitude of small fragments of a sententious cast, fitted for

quotation. Enough remains to make his greatness felt.
Without undervaluing other writers of Comedy, I think it may be said

that Menander and Moliere stand alone specially as comic poets of
the feelings and the idea. In each of them there is a conception of

the Comic that refines even to pain, as in the Menedemus of the
Heautontimorumenus, and in the Misanthrope. Menander and Moliere

have given the principal types to Comedy hitherto. The Micio and
Demea of the Adelphi, with their opposing views of the proper

management of youth, are still alive; the Sganarelles and Arnolphes
of the Ecole des Maris and the Ecole des Femmes, are not all buried.

Tartuffe is the father of the hypocrites; Orgon of the dupes;
Thraso, of the braggadocios; Alceste of the 'Manlys'; Davus and

Syrus of the intriguing valets, the Scapins and Figaros. Ladies
that soar in the realms of Rose-Pink, whose language wears the

nodding plumes of intellectualconceit, are traceable to Philaminte
and Belise of the Femmes Savantes: and the mordant witty women have

the tongue of Celimene. The reason is, that these two poets
idealized upon life: the foundation of their types is real and in

the quick, but they painted with spiritual strength, which is the
solid in Art.

The idealistic conceptions of Comedy gives breadth and opportunities
of daring to Comic genius, and helps to solve the difficulties it

creates. How, for example, shall an audience be assured that an
evident and monstrous dupe is actually deceived without being an

absolute fool? In Le Tartuffe the note of high Comedy strikes when
Orgon on his return home hears of his idol's excellent appetite.

'Le pauvre homme!' he exclaims. He is told that the wife of his
bosom has been unwell. 'Et Tartuffe?' he asks, impatient to hear

him spoken of, his mind suffused with the thought of Tartuffe, crazy
with tenderness, and again he croons, 'Le pauvre homme!' It is the

mother's cry of pitying delight at a nurse's recital of the feats in
young animal gluttony of her cherished infant. After this

masterstroke of the Comic, you not only put faith in Orgon's roseate
prepossession, you share it with him by comic sympathy, and can

listen with no more than a tremble of the laughing muscles to the
instance he gives of the sublimehumanity of Tartuffe:

'Un rien presque suffit pour le scandaliser,
Jusque-le, qu'il se vint l'autre jour accuser

D'avoir pris une puce en faisant sa priere,
Et de l'avoir tuee avec trop de colere.'

And to have killed it too wrathfully! Translating Moliere is like
humming an air one has heard performed by an accomplished violinist

of the pure tones without flourish.
Orgon, awakening to find another dupe in Madame Pernelle,

incredulous of the revelations which have at last opened his own
besotted eyes, is a scene of the double Comic, vivified by the spell

previously cast on the mind. There we feel the power of the poet's
creation; and in the sharp light of that sudden turn the humanity is

livelier than any realistic work can make it.
Italian Comedy gives many hints for a Tartuffe; but they may be

found in Boccaccio, as well as in Machiavelli's Mandragola. The
Frate Timoteo of this piece is only a very oily friar, compliantly

assisting an intrigue with ecclesiastical sophisms (to use the
mildest word) for payment. Frate Timoteo has a fine Italian

priestly pose.
DONNA: Credete voi, che'l Turco passi questo anno in Italia?

F. TIM.: Se voi non fate orazione, si.
Priestly arrogance and unctuousness, and trickeries and casuistries,

cannot be painted without our discovering a likeness in the long
Italian gallery. Goldoni sketched the Venetian manners of the

decadence of the Republic with a French pencil, and was an Italian
Scribe in style.

The Spanish stage is richer in such Comedies as that which furnished
the idea of the Menteur to Corneille. But you must force yourself

to believe that this liar is not forcing his vein when he piles lie
upon lie. There is no preceding touch to win the mind to credulity.