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Agrippa, Henry Cornelius, the mediæval doctor and magician, was born at Cologne in 1486, and was educated at the university of that city. He was denounced in 1509 by the monks, who called him an “impious cabalist”; in 1531 he published his treatise De Occulta Philosophia, written by the advice and with the assistance of the Abbot Trithemius of Wurzburg, the preceptor of Paracelsus. In 1510 he came to London on a diplomatic mission, and was the guest of Dean Colet at Stepney. He afterwards fought at the battle of Ravenna. In 1511 he attended the schismatic council of Pisa as a theologian. In 1515 he lectured at the university of Pavia. We afterwards find him at Metz, Geneva, and Freiburg, where he practised as a physician. In 1529 he was appointed historiographer to Charles V. He died at Grenoble in 1535. A man of such vast and varied learning could hardly in those days have avoided being accused of diabolical practices and heretical opinions; the only wonder is that he was not burned alive for his scientific attainments, which were looked upon as dangerous in the highest degree. (Pauline in the Latin prefatory note.)

“A King lived long ago.” Song in Pippa Passes, which is sung by the girl as she passes the house of Luigi. Mr. Browning first published the song in the Monthly Repository, in 1835 (vol ix., N.S., pp. 707-8), it was reprinted with added lines, and was revised throughout, in Pippa Passes 1841.

Alberic (Sordello). Son of Eccelino the monk, described in the poem as “many-muscled, big-boned Alberic.”

Alcestis (Balaustion’s Adventure), the daughter of Pelias, was the wife of Admetus, son of Pheres, who was king of Pheræ in Thessaly. Apollo, when – for an offence against Jupiter – he was banished from heaven, had been kindly received by Pheres, and had obtained from the Fates a promise that his benefactor should never die if he could find another person willing to lay down his life for him. The story how this promise was obtained is set forth with great dramatic force in Mr. Browning’s Apollo and the Fates (q. v.). Alcestis volunteered to die in the place of her husband when he lay sick unto death. Her sacrifice was accepted, and she died. But Hercules, who had been hospitably entertained by Pheres, hearing of the tragic circumstance, brought Alcestis from Hades out of gratitude to his host, and presented her to her grief-stricken husband. Euripides has used these circumstances as the basis of his tragedy of Alcestis.

“All Service ranks the same with God.” A song in Pippa Passes.

Amphibian. The Prologue to Fifine at the Fair is headed “Amphibian,” under which title it is included in the Selections.

Anael. A Druse girl who loves Djabal and believes him to be divine (The Return of the Druses).

Andrea del Sarto [The Man] Men and Women, 1855, called “the faultless painter,” also Andrea senza Errori (Andrew the Unerring) was a great painter of the Florentine School. His father was a tailor (sarto), so the Italians, with their passion for nicknames, dubbed him “The Tailor’s Andrew.” He was born in Gualfonda, Florence, in 1487. It is not certain what was his real name: Vannuchi has been constantly given, but without authority. He was at first put to work with a goldsmith, but he disliked the business, and preferred drawing his master’s models. He was next placed with a wood-carver and painter, one Gian Barill, with whom he remained till 1498. He then went to the draughtsman and colourist, Piero di Cosimo, under whom he studied the cartoons of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. We next find him opening a shop in partnership with his friend Francia Bigio, but the arrangement did not last long. The brotherhood of the Servi employed Andrea from 1509 to 1514 in adorning their church of the Annunziata at Florence. Mrs. Jameson, in her Legends of the Monastic Orders, thus describes the church and cloisters identified with the work of this painter at Florence: “Every one who has been at Florence must remember the Church of the ‘Annunziata’; every one who remembers that glorious church, who has lingered in the cloisters and the cortile where Andrea del Sarto put forth all his power – where the Madonna del Sacco and the Birth of the Virgin attest what he could do and be as a painter – will feel interested in the Order of the Servi. Among the extraordinary outbreaks of religious enthusiasm in the thirteenth century, this was in its origin one of the most singular. Seven Florentines, rich, noble, and in the prime of life, whom a similarity of taste and feeling had drawn together, used to meet every day in a chapel dedicated to the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin (then outside the walls of Florence), there to sing the Ave or evening service in honour of the Madonna, for whom they had an especial love and veneration. They became known and remarked in their neighbourhood for those acts of piety, so that the women and children used to point at them as they passed through the streets and exclaim, Guardate i Servi di Maria (Behold the Servants of the Virgin!) Hence the title afterwards assumed by the Order.” These seven gentlemen at length forsook the world, sold all their possessions and distributed their money to the poor, and retired to a solitary spot in the mountains about six miles out of Florence; here they built themselves huts of boughs and stones, and devoted themselves to the service of the Virgin. It was for the cloisters of the church of the Servi at Florence that Andrea del Sarto painted the Riposo. His Nativity of the B.V. Mary is a grand fresco, the characters are noble and dignified, and “draped in the magnificent taste which distinguished Andrea.” The following account of the artist’s life is summarised from the article on Del Sarto by Mr. W. M. Rossetti in the Encyc. Brit. He was an easy-going plebeian, to whom a modest position in life and scanty gains were no grievances. As an artist he must have known his own value; but he probably rested content in the sense of his superlative powers as an executant, and did not aspire to the rank of a great inventor or leader, for which, indeed, he had no vocation. He led a social sort of life among his compeers of the art. He fell in love with Lucrezia del Fede, wife of a hatter named Carlo Recanati; the latter dying opportunely, the tailor’s son married her on December 26th, 1512. She was a very handsome woman, and has come down to us treated with great suavity in many a picture of her lover-husband, who constantly painted her as a Madonna or otherwise; and even in painting other women he made them resemble Lucrezia in general type. Vasari, who was at one time a pupil of Andrea, describes her as faithless, jealous, overbearing, and vixenish with the apprentices. She lived to a great age, surviving her second husband forty years. Before the end of 1516, a Pietà of his composition, and afterwards a Madonna, were sent to the French Court. These were received with applause; and the art-loving monarch Francis I. suggested in 1518 that Andrea should come to Paris. He left his wife in Florence and went accordingly, and was very cordially received, and moreover for the first time in his life handsomely remunerated. His wife urged him to return to Italy. The king assented, on the understanding that his absence was to be short; and he entrusted Andrea with a sum of money to be expended in purchasing works of art for the king. Andrea could not resist temptation, and spent the king’s money and some of his own in building a house for himself in Florence. He fell into disgrace with the king, but no serious punishment followed. In 1520 he resumed work in Florence, and painted many pictures for the cloisters of Lo Scalzo. He dwelt in Florence throughout the memorable siege, which was followed by an infectious pestilence. He caught the malady, struggled against it with little or no tending from his wife, who held aloof, and died, no one knowing much about it at the moment, on January 22nd, 1531, at the early age of forty-three. He was buried unceremoniously in the church of the Servi. Mr. Rossetti gives the following criticisms on his work as an artist. “Andrea had true pictorial style, a very high standard of correctness, and an enviable balance of executive endowments. The point of technique in which he excelled least was perhaps that of discriminating the varying textures of different objects and surfaces. There is not much elevation or ideality in his works – much more of reality.” He lacked invention notwithstanding his great technical skill. He had no inward impulse toward the high and noble; he was a man without fervour, and had no enthusiasm for the true and good. It is said that Michelangelo once remarked that if he had attempted greater things he might have rivalled Rafael, but Andrea was not a man for the mountain-top – the plains sufficed for him.

[The Poem.] On the bare historical facts, as recorded by Vasari in his life of Andrea del Sarto, Mr. Browning has framed this wonderful art-poem. He has taken Vasari’s “notes” and framed “not another sound but a star,” as he says in his Abt Vogler. Given the Vasari life, he has mixed it with his thought, and has transfigured it so that the sad, infinitely pathetic soul, in its stunted growth and wasted form, lives before us in Mr. Browning’s lines. As Abt Vogler is his greatest music-poem, so this is his greatest art-poem, and both are unique. No poet has ever given us such utterances on music and painting as we possess in these works: if all the poet’s work were to perish save these, they would suffice to insure immortality for their author. It is said that the poem was suggested by a picture in the Pitti Palace at Florence. “Faultless but soulless” is the verdict of art critics on Andrea’s works. Why is this? Mr. Browning’s poem tells us in no hesitating phrase that the secret lay in the fact that Andrea was an immoral man, an infatuated man, passionately demanding love from a woman who had neither heart nor intellect, a wife for whom he sacrificed his soul and the highest interests of his art. He knew and loved Lucrezia while she was another man’s wife; he was content that she should also love other men when she was his. He robbed King Francis, his generous patron, that he might give the money to his unworthy spouse. He neglected his parents in their poverty and old age. Is there not in these facts the secret of his failure? To Mr. Browning there is, and his poem tells us why. But, it will be objected, many great geniuses have been immoral men. This is so, but we cannot argue the point here; the poet’s purpose is to show how in this particular case the evil seed bore fruit after its kind. The poem opens with the artist’s attempts to bribe his wife by money to accord him a little semblance of love: he promises to paint that he may win gold for her. The keynote of the poem is struck in these opening words. It is evening, and Andrea is weary with his work, but never weary of praising Lucrezia’s beauty; sadly he owns that he is at best only a shareholder in his wife’s affections, that even her pride in him is gone, that she neither understands nor cares to understand his art. He tells her that he can do easily and perfectly what at the bottom of his heart he wishes for, deep as that might be; he could do what others agonise to do all their lives and fail in doing, yet he knows for all that there burns a truer light of God in them than in him. Their works drop groundward, though their souls have glimpses of heaven that are denied to him. He could have beaten Rafael had he possessed Rafael’s soul; for the Urbinate’s technical skill, as he half hesitatingly shows, is inferior to his own; and had his Lucrezia urged him, inspired him, to claim a seat by the side of Michelangelo and Rafael, he might for her sake have done it. He sees he is but a half-man working in an atmosphere of silver-grey. He had his chance at Fontainebleau; there he sometimes seemed to leave the ground, but he had a chain which dragged him down. Lucrezia called him. Not only for her did he forsake the higher art ambitions, but the common ground of honesty; he descended to cement his walls with the gold of King Francis which he had stolen, and for her. From dishonesty to connivance at his wife’s infidelity is an easy step; and so, while in the act of expressing his remorse at his ingratitude to the king, we find him asking Lucrezia quite naturally, as a matter of ordinary occurrence —

 
“Must you go?
That cousin here again? he waits outside?
Must see you – you, and not with me?”
 

Here we discover the secret of the soullessness: the fellow has the tailor in his blood, even though the artist is supreme at the fingers’ ends. He is but the craftsman after all. Think of Fra Angelico painting his saints and angels on his knees, straining his eyes to catch the faintest glimpse of the heavenly radiance of Our Lady’s purity and holiness, feeling that he failed, too dazzled by the brightness of Divine light, to catch more than its shadow, and we shall know why there is soul in the great Dominican painter, and why there is none in the Sarto. Lucrezia, despicable as she was, was not the cause of her husband’s failure. His marriage, his treatment of Francis, his allowing his parents to starve, to die of want, while he paid gaming debts for his wife’s lover, – all these things tell us what the man was. No woman ruined his soul; he had no soul to ruin!

Notes. —Fiesole, a small but famous episcopal city of Italy, on the crown of a hill above the Arno, about three miles to the west of Florence. Morello, a mountain of the Apennines. The Urbinate: Rafael was born at Urbino. George Vasari, painter and author of the “Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors and Architects.” Rafael, Raphael Sanzio of Urbino. Agnolo: Michel Agnolo is the more correct form of Michael Angelo. Francis, King Francis I. of France, the royal patron of Andrea. Fontainebleau, a town of France 37 miles S.E. of Paris; its palace is one of the most sumptuous in France. “The Roman’s is the better when you pray.” Catholics, however, do not use the works of the great masters for devotional purposes nearly so much as might be supposed. No “miraculous” picture is by this class. Cue-owls: The Scops Owl: Scops Giú (Scopoli). Its cry is a ringing “ki-ou” – whence Italian “chiù” or “ciù.” “Walls in the New Jerusalem.” Revelation xxi. 15-17. Leonard, Leonardo da Vinci.

Andromeda. In Pauline, Mr. Browning has commemorated the fascination for his youthful mind which was exercised by an engraving of a picture by Caravaggio of Andromeda and Perseus. This picture was always before him as a boy, and he loved the story of the divine deliverer and the innocent victim which it presented. The lines begin

 
“Andromeda!
And she is with me, – years roll, I shall change,
But change can touch her not.”
 

Another Way of Love. See One Way of Love, this poem being its sequel.

Any Wife to Any Husband. A dying wife finds the bitterest thing in death to be the certainty that her husband’s love for her, which, would life but last, she could retain, will fade and wither when she is no longer present to tend it:

 
“Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
’Tis woman’s whole existence.”
 

The great pure love of a wife is a reign of love. Woman’s love is more durable and purer than man’s, and few men are entirely worthy of being the objects of that which they can so imperfectly understand. Mr. Nettleship, commenting on this poem, very truly says, “The real love of the man is never born until the love of the woman supplements it.” The wife of the poem feels that there would be no difficulty in her case about being faithful to the memory of her husband; but she foresees that his love will not long survive the loss of her personal presence. This will be to depreciate the value of his life to him; his love will come back to her again at last, back to the heart’s place kept for him, but with a stain upon it. The old love will be re-coined, re-issued from the mint, and given to others to spend, alas! with some alloy as well as with a new image and superscription. She foresees that he will dissipate his soul in the love of other woman, he will excuse himself by the assurance that the light loves will make no impression on the deep-set memory of the woman who is immortally his bride; he will have a Titian’s Venus to desecrate his wall rather than leave it bare and cold, – but the flesh-loves will not impair the soul-love.

Apollo and the Fates. (See Prologue to Parleyings.) Apollo (the Sun God), having offended Jupiter by slaying the Cyclopes, who forged his thunderbolts by which he had killed Æsculapius for bringing dead men to life, had been banished from heaven. He became servant to Admetus, king of Thessaly, in whose employment he remained nine years as one of his shepherds. He was treated with great kindness by his master, and they became true lovers of each other. When Apollo, restored to the favour of heaven, had left the service of Admetus and resumed his god-like offices, he heard that his old master and friend was sick unto death, and he determined to save his life. Accordingly he descended on Mount Parnassus, and penetrated to the abode of the Fates, in the dark regions below the roots of the mountains, and there he found the three who preside over the destinies of mankind – Clotho with her distaff, Lachesis with her spindle, and Atropos with a pair of scissors about to cut the thread of Admetus’ life – and begins to plead for the life of his friend Admetus, whom Atropos has just doomed to death. The Fates bid Apollo go back to earth and wake it from dreams. Apollo demands a truce to their doleful amusement, and requests them to extend the years of Admetus to threescore and ten. The Fates ask him if he thinks it would add to his friend’s joy to have his life lengthened, seeing that life is only illusion? Infancy is but ignorance and mischief, youth becomes foolishness, and age churlishness. Apollo should ask for life for one whom he hates, not for the friend he loves. The Sun’s beams produce such semblance of good as exists by simply gilding the evil. Apollo objects that if it were happier to die, men’s greeting would not be “Long life!” but “Death to you!” Man loves his life, and he ought to know best. The Fates say this is all the glamour shed by Apollo’s rays. Apollo concedes that man desponds when debarred of illusion: “suppose he has in himself some compensative law?” and the God then produces a bowl of wine, man’s invention, of which he invites them to taste. The Fates, after some objection, drink and get tipsy and merry, Atropos even declaring she could live at a pinch! Apollo delivers them a lecture; he tells them Bacchus invented the wine; as he was the youngest of the gods, he had to discover some new gift whereby to claim the homage of man. He tampered with nothing already arranged, yet would introduce change without shock. As the sunbeams and Apollo had transformed the Fates’ cavern without displacing a splinter, so has the gift of Bacchus turned the adverse things of life to a kindlier aspect; man accepts the good with the bad, and acquiesces in his fate; this is the work of Zeus. He demands of the Fates if, after all, Life be so devoid of good? “Quashed be our quarrel!” they exclaim, and they dance till an explosion from the earth’s centre brings them to their senses once more, and the pact is dissolved. They learn that the powers above them are not to be cajoled into interfering with the laws of life and the inevitable decrees of which the Fates are but the ministers. At last they agree to lengthen the life of Admetus if any mortal can be found to forgo the fulfilment of his own life on his account. Apollo protests that the king’s subjects will strive with one another for the glory of dying that their king may survive. First in all Pheræ will his father offer himself as his son’s substitute. “Bah!” says Clotho. “Then his mother,” suggests Apollo; “or, spurning the exchange, the king may choose to die.” With the jeers of the three the scene closes. Mr. Browning’s lovely poem Balaustion’s Adventure should be read next after this, as the Prologue to the Parleyings has little or no relation to the rest of the volume.

Notes. —Parnassus, a mountain of Greece, sacred to the Muses and Apollo and Bacchus. Dire ones, the Fates, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos. Admetus, the husband of Alcestis, whose wife died to save his life. The Fates, the Destinies, the goddesses supposed to preside over human life: Clotho, who spins the thread of life; Lachesis, who determines the length of the thread; Atropos, who cuts it off. Woe-purfled, embroidered with woe. Weal-prankt, decked out with prosperity. Moirai, the Parcæ, the Fates. Zeus, Jupiter, the Supreme Being. Eld, old age. Sweet Trine, the Three, the Trinity of Fates. Bacchus, the Wine-God. Semele’s Son: Semele was the daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia; when Zeus appeared to her in his Divine splendour she was consumed by the flames and gave birth to Bacchus, whom Zeus saved from the fire and hid in his thigh. Bacchus, when made a god, raised her to heaven under the name of Thyone. Swound, a swoon. Cummers, gossips, female acquaintances. Collyrium, eye-wash. Pheræ, a town in Thessaly, where King Pheres reigned, who was the father of Admetus.

Apparent Failure. (Dramatis Personæ, 1864.) Mr. Ruskin has laboured hard to save St. Mark’s, Venice, from the destroying hand of the restorer. Mr. Browning wrote this poem to save from complete destruction a much less important, though a celebrated building, the Paris Morgue, the deadhouse wherein are exposed the bodies of persons found dead, that they may be claimed by their friends. The Doric little Morgue is close to Notre Dame, on the banks of the Seine, and is one of the sights of Paris – repulsive as it is – which everybody makes a point of seeing. The poet entered the building and saw behind the great screen of glass three bodies exposed for identification on the copper couch fronting him. They were three men who had killed themselves, and the poet mentally questions them why they abhorred their lives so much. You “poor boy” wanted to be an emperor, forsooth; you “old one” were a red socialist, and this next one fell a prey to misdirected love. The three deadly sins of Pride, Covetousness, and Lust had each its victim. And before them stands the poet of optimism, not staggered in his doctrine even by this sad sight. Not for a moment does his faith fail that “what God blessed once can never prove accurst.” His optimism in this poem is at high-water mark; where some weak-kneed believers in humanity would have found a breaking link in the chain, Mr. Browning sees but “apparent failure,” and declines to believe the doom of these poor wrecks of souls to be final.

Apparitions. (Introduction to The Two Poets of Croisic, 1878.) This exquisite poem is a tribute to the charm exercised by a human face, from which looks out God’s own smile, gladdening a cold and scowling prospect as a burst of May soon dispels the lingering chills of winter.

Appearances. (Pacchiarotto, with other Poems, 1876.) Metaphysicians would explain this poem by an essay on the association of ideas; strong as imagination is, it can never exceed experience which has come to us through sight. Feelings are associated with one another according as they have been operant in more or less frequent succession. Reasoning may associate ideas, but for force and permanence our actual sight, and contact are the wonder-workers in this department of soul-life. Nothing can beautify the place where we have in the past suffered some great mental distress or wrong; so no place can ever be unbeautiful where the true lover wins his life’s prize. When the upholsterer’s art does more for a room than the memory of a first love, that love is not of the eternal sort our poet sings.

Aprile. The Italian poet who sought to love, as Paracelsus sought to know. He represents the Renaissance spirit in its emotional aspect, as Paracelsus represents the spirit of the Reformation in its passion for knowledge. As Mr. Browning says, they were the “two halves of a dissevered world.” (Paracelsus.)

Arcades Ambo. (Asolando, 1889.) If a man runs away in battle when the balls begin to fly, we call him a coward. He may excuse himself by the argument that man must at all risks shun death. This is the excuse made by the vivisector: he is often a kind and amiable man in every other relation of life than in that aspect of his profession which demands, as he holds, the torture of living animals for the advancement of the healing art. Health of the body must be preserved at all costs; the moral health is of little or no consequence in comparison with that of the body; above all we must not die, death is the one thing to be avoided, hide therefore from the darts of the King of Terrors behind the whole creation of lower animals. Mr. Browning says this is cowardice exactly parallel with that of the soldier who runs away in battle; the principle being that at all costs life is the one thing to be preserved. The Anti-Vivisectionist principles of Mr. Browning were very pronounced. He was for many years associated with Miss F. P. Cobbe in her efforts to suppress the practice of torturing animals for scientific purposes, and was a Vice-President of the Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection at the time of his death. See my Browning’s Message to his Time (chapter on “Browning and Vivisection”).

Aristophanes, the celebrated comic poet of Athens, was born probably about the year 448 B.C. His first comedy was brought out in 427 B.C. Plato in his Symposium gives Aristophanes a position at the side of Socrates. The festivals of Dionysus greatly promoted the production of tragedies, comedies and satiric dramas. The greater Dionysia were held in the city of Athens in the month of March, and were connected with the natural feeling of joy at the approach of summer. These Bacchanalian festivals were scenes of gross licentiousness, and the coarseness which pervades much of the work of the great Greek comedian was due to the fact that the popular taste demanded grossness of allusion on occasions like these. The Athenian dramatist of the old school was entirely unrestrained. He could satirise even the Eleusinian mysteries, could deal abundantly in personalities, burlesque the most sacred subjects, and ridicule the most prominent persons in the republic. Professor Jebb, in his article on Aristophanes in the Encyclopedia Britannica, says: “It is neither in the denunciation nor in the mockery that he is most individual. His truest and highest faculty is revealed by those wonderful bits of lyric writing in which he soars above everything that can move to laughter or tears, and makes the clear air thrill with the notes of a song as free, as musical and as wild as that of the nightingale invoked by his own chorus in the Birds. The speech of Dikaios Logos in the Clouds, the praises of country life in the Peace, the serenade in the Eccleziazusæ, the songs of the Spartan and Athenian maidens in the Lysistrata; above all, perhaps, the chorus in the Frogs, the beautiful chant of the Initiated, – these passages, and such as these, are the true glories of Aristophanes. They are the strains, not of an artist, but of one who warbles for pure gladness of heart in some place made bright by the presence of a god. Nothing else in Greek poetry has quite this wild sweetness of the woods. Of modern poets Shakespeare alone, perhaps, has it in combination with a like richness and fertility of fancy.” Fifty-four comedies were ascribed to Aristophanes. We possess only eleven: these deal with Athenian life during a period of thirty-six years. The political satires of the poet, therefore, cannot be understood without a knowledge of Athenian history, and an acquaintance with its life during the period in which the poet wrote. “Aristophanes was a natural conservative,” says Professor Jebb; “his ideal was the Athens of the Persian wars. He detested the vulgarity and the violence of mob-rule; he clove to the old worship of the gods; he regarded the new ideas of education as a tissue of imposture and impiety. As a mocker he is incomparable for the union of subtlety with wit of the comic imagination. As a poet he is immortal.” The momentous period in the history of Greece during which Aristophanes began to write, forms the groundwork, more or less, of so many of his comedies, that it is impossible to understand them, far less to appreciate their point, without some acquaintance with its leading events. All men’s thoughts were occupied by the great contest for supremacy between the rival states of Athens and Sparta, known as the Peloponnesian War. It is not necessary here to enter into details; but the position of the Athenians during the earlier years of the struggle must be briefly described. Their strength lay chiefly in their fleet; in the other arms of war they were confessedly no match for Sparta and her confederate allies. The heavy-armed Spartan infantry, like the black Spanish bands of the fifteenth century, was almost irresistible in the field. Year after year the invaders marched through the Isthmus into Attica, or were landed in strong detachments on different points of the coast, while the powerful Bœotian cavalry swept all the champaign, burning the towns and villages, cutting down the crops, destroying vines and olive-groves, – carrying this work of devastation almost up to the very walls of Athens. For no serious attempt was made to resist these periodical invasions. The strategy of the Athenians was much the same as it had been when the Persian hosts swept down upon them fifty years before. Again they withdrew themselves and all their movable property within the city walls, and allowed the invaders to overrun the country with impunity. Their flocks and herds were removed into the islands on the coasts, where, so long as Athens was mistress of the sea, they would be in comparative safety. It was a heavy demand upon their patriotism; but, as before, they submitted to it, trusting that the trial would be but brief, and nerved to it by the stirring words of their great leader Pericles. The ruinous sacrifice, and even the personal suffering, involved in this forced migration of a rural population into a city wholly inadequate to accommodate them, may easily be imagined, even if it had not been forcibly described by the great historian of those times. Some carried with them the timber framework of their homes, and set it up in such vacant spaces as they could find. Others built for themselves little “chambers on the wall,” or occupied the outer courts of the temples, or were content with booths and tents set up under the Long Walls, which connected the city with the harbour of Piræus. Some – if our comic satirist is to be trusted – were even fain to sleep in tubs and hen-coops. Provisions grew dear and scarce. Pestilence broke out in the overcrowded city; and in the second and third years of the war the great plague carried off, out of their comparatively small population, about 10,000 of all ranks. But it needed a pressure of calamity far greater than the present to keep a good citizen of Athens away from the theatre. If the times were gloomy, so much the more need of a little honest diversion. The comic drama was to the Athenians what a free press is to modern commonwealths. It is probable that Aristophanes was himself earnestly opposed to the continuance of the war, and spoke his own sentiments on this point by the mouth of his characters; but the prevalent disgust at the hardships of this long-continued siege – for such it practically was – would in any case be a tempting subject for the professed writer of burlesques; and the caricature of a leading politician, if cleverly drawn, is always a success for the author. The Thesmophoriazusæ is a comedy about the fair sex, whose whole point – like that also of the comedy of the Frogs– lies in a satire upon Euripides. Aristophanes never wearied of holding this poet up to ridicule. Why this was so is not to be discovered: it may have been that the conservative principles of Aristophanes were offended by some new-fashioned ideas of his brother poet. The Thesmophoria was a festival of women only, in honour of Ceres and Proserpine. Euripides was reputed to be a woman-hater: in one of his tragedies he says,