fore, lays hold of a tendency in the old comedian, as a topic of censure, which the improved delicacy of the Augustan age had not chastised out of himself. Neither is his present squeamishness, as to Plautus, in unison with his approbation expressed elsewhere, of the still less delicate old comedy nor is it very consistent to find fault with Plautus on this head, and yet to relish Aristophanes, who must be included, for more than his versification, in the general advice, Vos exemplaria Græca Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna. After all, Horace, while exhibiting the faults of preceding poets in a strong point of view, for the purpose of checking the extravagance of admiration, only attributes such to Plautus as are common to early dramatic writers in every age and country: in our own, not only to the Chapmans, the Lylys, and the Deckers, but to Shakspeare, Jonson, and Fletcher. If Horace has censured the too coarse style of Plautus, Cæsar, on the supposition that the following lines are truly ascribed to him, characterises Terence's plays as devoid of comic spirit: Tu quoque, tu in summis, ô dimidiate Menander, Cum Græcis, neque in hac despectus parte jaceres. By the expression, dimidiate Menander, it is obvious that the deficiency is not to be understood as confined to the comic drollery of the old and middle comedy, with which Plautus had so enchanted the dramatic world, as to continue the reigning favourite, not only after the appearance of Afranius and Terence, but throughout the Augustan age. Cæsar evidently represents him as defective also in that other species of comic heightening in which the Greek comedians of the new school excelled. When he calls Terence a Menander by halves, he pronounces him to be a beautiful, but faint shadow of his Grecian prototype. To account for this from the stubbornness of the Latin tongue, and to say with Dr. Hurd, that the two first lines are complimentary, and the censure confined to the following, may improve Terence's relative situation with Menander, about whom we know so little, but it leaves the lack of vis comica where it found it. Menander, very probably, possessed as little of it; but had Terence felt it in himself, he would have discovered precedents and models for its practical use, with the same ease and success with which he copied the urbanity of Menander. But in fact Terence, however Mr. Colman may plead against it, was, in some of his plays, little more than a translator of that author. With a fund of original humour, he might have effected a coalition of the old and new comedy from the materials before him, superior to any thing in the Greek in every respect, excepting that of language. But there, Quinctilian puts any approach to a rival grace entirely out of the question, by limiting that undefinable subtlety of expression to one dialect, even of the Greek. "Vix levem consequimur umbram, adeo ut mihi sermo ipse Romanus non recipere videatur illam solis concessam Atticis Venerem, quando eam ne Græci quidem in alio genere linguæ obtinuerint.”—Instit. Orat. lib. x. 1. One truth seems to apply to the strictures both of Horace and of Cæsar. Critical censures, especially when conveyed in verse, which so narrowly confines the space for qualification, and furnishes so strong a temptation to pointed sayings, are, in most cases, expressed too positively, and with exaggeration. The loss of Menander's works prevents us from comparing the copyist with his original; but we must not be hurried away by the idea, that because originality and humour were not Terence's strong hold, and because in some of his pieces he was a professed translator, he had no portion of those qualities. There are touches, both of comic humour and of true taste in his works, scarcely to be surpassed in point of spirit, whatever advantage in point of elegance a more tractable language might have given to an Attic writer: and touches so natural, that in the absence of matterof-fact testimony, we may reasonably infer that they were native and not adopted. Donatus first, and afterwards Hurd in his Horace, have referred to the following as a peculiarly happy stroke of character in the Hecyra: Tum tu igitur nihil adtulisti huc plus una sententia? Laches, the speaker, a covetous old legacyhunter, has been eagerly enquiring what his kinsman Phania had bequeathed him. Pamphilus stops his mouth with the moral reflection, that he left behind him the praise of having lived well. "Is a sentence all you have brought home?" The spirit of this is exquisite, and the turn truly comic. Dr. Hurd says, in his Dissertation on the Provinces of the Drama, that "this is true humour. For his character, which was that of a lover of money, drew the observation naturally and forcibly from him. His disappointment of a rich succession made him speak contemptibly of a moral lesson, which rich and covetous men, in their best humours, have no high reverence for. And this too without design; which is important, and shows the distinction of what, in the more restrained sense of the word, we call humour, from other modes of pleasantry. For had a young friend of the son, an unconcerned spectator of the scene, made the observation, it had then, in another's mouth, been wit, or a designed banter on the father's disappointment.' Of this humour, distinguished from pleasantry, there is another admirable instance in the Hecyra, and that in the same character of Laches: Odiosa hæc est ætas adolescentulis : E medio æquom excedere est. Postremo jam nos fabulæ Sumus, Pamphile, senex, atque anus. On this Dr. Hurd further remarks, "There is nothing, I suppose, in these words which provokes a smile. Yet the humour is strong, as before. In his solicitude to promote his son's satisfaction, he lets fall a sentiment truly characteristic, and which old men usually take great pains to conceal; I mean, his acknowledgment of that suspicious fear of contempt, which is natural to old age. So true a picture of life, in the representation of this weakness, might, in other circumstances, have created some pleasantry; but the occasion which forced it from him, discovering at the same time the amiable disposition of the speaker, covers the ridicule of it, or more properly converts it into an object of our esteem." There is no character, in the delineation of which Terence excels more, than in that of the quaint and sometimes splenetic, but kind-hearted old man. Micio and Demea are an admirably contrasted pair of brothers. Chremes and Simo, in the Andrian, are naturally drawn and consistently supported. The long narrative of the latter, in the opening scene, is also a strong confirmation of Diderot's remark on this author's especial skill in conducting such necessary explanations. The French critic notices the absence of wit, or display of sentiment, which he says are always out of place. This is perfectly true; but quiet pathos, and the natural mixing up of amiable and selfish feeling, which we encounter so much more frequently in life than staring exhibitions either of virtue or vice, are quite compatible with the narrative parts of dramatic poetry, and give an interest and a heightening to it, without which the mere relation of the tale would be insipid. Of this we have a pregnant instance in the following passage of Simo's story: Ibi tum filius Cum illis, qui amabant Chrysidem, una aderat frequens ; Nonnunquam conlacrumabat. Placuit tum id mihi : Causa, hujus mortem tam fert familiariter: Quid, si ipse amasset? quid hic mihi faciet, patri? |