exultation of the Chorus at the recovery of Peace, which is far from unpleasant. Happy I, that know no care, Helm, nor shield, nor coarse camp-fare! My fire-side seat, at home, I take: Oh, Jove! 'tis rapture over much. In troth, it is a super-dainty thing, When seeding time is o'er, and rain, thank heaven, O'tis sweet, when fields are ringing While our grateful voices chime, 'Happy season! blessed time!' The length to which our remarks have run, prevents us from enlarging upon several minor topics, which might be drawn from the perusal of these comedies; such as the state in which Aristophanes found the drama, the improvements which he made in it, &c. We should have wished also to shew a little more at length this poet's manner of mixing with his audience, and connecting them with the business on the stage. That species of humour too, by which he guards against pleasantries at his own manner of writing, would not have been undeserving of attention, nor the freedom of remark which he exhibits upon the religion of his country, and the toleration which his sarcasms on that point experienced from his audience. Enough, however, has been done to shew that Aristophanes was not merely a punster, as Plutarch would have it, nor, what Voltaire, with at least as much ignorance as wit, describes him, a Greek comic poet, who was deficient in comedy, and had no notion of poetry. The nation which possesses a Molière or a Sheridan, may be content to do without an Aristophanes: but still the latter is no contemptible genius. He stands alone; he is a writer sui generis: he can be judged by no modern tribunals: the laws of the drama, under which he wrote, were different from ours; the audience to whom his plays were addressed, was different; the manners, and the customs, and the ideas, and the purposes for which they are written, were different. Human nature, however, does not so entirely differ, but that enough is still left for us to understand, to relish and to imitate. His pictures are highly curious and entertaining, and, as fac-similes of the times, are more valuable than more general delineations; possessing much the same degree of point and faithfulness, we should imagine, as the one-act comedies of the Spaniards, mentioned by the noble author of the Life of Lopez de Vega. If the general defini-tion of wit be true, that it is the unexpected combination of distant resemblances, nothing can more deserve the name, than the dialogue of Aristophanes. He finds allusions in things seemingly the most incongruous, and in scenes apparently least susceptible of them, and we can easily conceive the roar of laughter which accompanied their application, and the surprise and confusion with which they must have covered the objects of them. His characters are rather sketches than portraits; but they discover the hand of a master, and they are written as painters write their names at Co. His knowledge of human nature is strong, though not diversified. It is almost all embodied in that one aggregate idea, which he had formed of his master, the people; and he appears to value his acquisitions merely as they aid him to soothe the vanity, awaken the jealousy, jealousy, or soften the irritability of this idol, whom he has set up. His writings take a stronger hold upon us from the strange combination of present delight, and the momentary fear of some offensive intrusion which the perusal of them enforces upon us. Hovering for ever upon the brink of what is disgusting, we yet do not lay him down; his wit redeems his indelicacy, his language covers the homeliness of his sentiments, while the execution of his dramas excuses the improbable fictions upon which they are frequently founded. If we feel pity and contempt for the low buffooneries to which his dependence upon the mob subjected him, we also admire the ingenuity with which he escapes from them; nor can we but be struck by the beautiful and moral effect, with which he frequently rises from his grovelling, and starts like the chrysalis from instant filth and deformity, into spirit, symmetry and loveliness. But Aristophanes must be read through: no extract will give a correct idea of his versatility, his side-stroke satire, his curvettings, and multiplied pleasantries. He must be read through too in the original; for no language but his own can do justice to that continual play upon words which he indulges. The parodies too, in which he so eminently excels, whether of passages from the poets, or the proceedings of their political assemblies, cannot be well relished without a knowledge of the originals to which they refer, and on which they form so valuable a comment. We agree with M. Dacier, that the scholar, who is not master of Aristophanes, can never have felt the full excellence of the Greek language. For harmony no poetry can compare with that of Aristophanes: and it sometimes forms a singular contrast with the homeliness of the dialogue. Breaks which produce the finest effect, and pauses more varied than those which enrich the Comus of Milton, or its exquisite prototype, the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher, occur for pages together. The gaiety of his measures is most delightful. The eye dances amid anapasts, and all the light and airy varieties of Greek metre. It is music absolutely painted to the eye; and we can conceive that to the susceptible ears of the Athenians, the language alone of Aristophanes, heightened by those modulations and inflexions which are lost upon us, must have created a fascination that was perfectly irresistible. The most varied metres of English versification will bear but a faint comparison with the richness, brilliancy, and ever-changing modes of Aristophanes. If the poet had invented nothing more than the anapastic tetrameter which bears his name, we should have hailed him as a mighty master in his art, and considered him as deserving the encomiums which the taste of Plato, and the penetration of the Persian king are well known to have bestowed upon him. VOL. IX. NO. XVII. ART. ART. X. Travels in various Countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa. By Edward Daniel Clarke, LL.D. Part the Second. Greece, Egypt, and the Holy Land, Section the First. 4to. . Cadell and Davies. London. 1812. ONCE more, like Xanthias in the ancient comedy, we resume our critical burthen in the suite of the lively and interesting traveller whose active curiosity we have already extolled, and the bitterness of whose prejudices we have sometimes had occasion to blame with an impartiality which should render our praises of greater value. But we recommence our task with better spirits, and with a fairer prospect of agreement with our author during the future stages of his narrative. We no longer follow him through the hard measure he met with from the Russian government, and the still harder names which he dealt to both government and people in return; --we pant not now after his rapid wheels through the regions of "filth and fraud,'-the wretched country -Ειτα βορβορος παχυς Και σκωρ αει νων, εν δε τέτω κείμενοι The frogs of the Kuban are passed, as well as the surly acus who kept, during the reign of Paul, the Russian frontier; Dionusus is at length arrived in those fields, which have, in every age, been the Elysium of the scholar and the antiquary ;-and we may hope, under his guidance, to be introduced to the pageants of ancient mythology, and the ghosts of poets and philosophers. The former volume landed Dr. Clarke at Pera, Nov. 6, 1800. That to which it is now our duty to introduce the reader, contains his observations during his first residence in that place, his progress by the coasts of Asia Minor to Egypt, and two short excursions from Alexandria to Cyprus and the Holy Land. It is scarcely too much to say, that we have followed him in his narrative with a pleasure only inferior to that of actually viewing the scenes which he delineates. The characteristic faults of the former volume are still, indeed, discernible. We have still to complain of a reliance on first impressions, which is not altogether compensated by an acuteness of observation undoubtedly more than common: we encounter, not unfrequently, a blindfold hurry of inference, which, had our author been of Milesian origin, would be considered as a national infirmity; that stumbles on its conclusions as if by accident, and is often right in defiance of its own chain of arguments. Even on his most favourite topics we have sometimes perceived a want of that previous knowledge, without which, to travel is but to wander, and we have suspected that he has rather read to illustrate his tour, than journeyed to illustrate his reading. We are not yet, perhaps, arrived at that period of his work, where we we may expect any discussion on the moral and political state of the Ottoman empire, though we confess that we would have gladly bartered for a little fresh information on this inexhaustible subject, the whole detail of the Sultan's procession to St. Sophia, (in spite of our satisfaction in learning that the same ceremonies are observed by the gentlemen ushers of his present highness, as had been detailed at large by De La Mottraye and Thevenot,) and have curtailed a little, for a few questions as to the present state of Cyprus, that hunting after intaglios, which Rousseau somewhere calls the distinctive mark of an English traveller, and which was prosecuted with so much perseverance as to leave little leisure for other inquiries, in one of the most interesting and least known islands of the world. With all these draw-backs Dr. Clarke is a tourist of no common stamp. His own discoveries are numerous, and where others have preceded him he has set their information in the clearest point of view; he is eminently gifted with that thirsty eye,' as old Tom Coryat calls it, which is perhaps the most important qualification of a traveller; he has, lastly, a power of selecting objects, and a raciness in describing them, which cannot be better described than as the antipodes of Chandler; and which are, we think, more conspicuous in the present volume than in that with which our readers are already acquainted. There is another circumstance, which we have in part anticipated, and which has made our progress with Dr. Clarke in the Archipelago and Mediterranean more agreeable than over the steppes of Russia. He no longer labours under the influence of that feeling, whether political, personal, or purely bilious, we know not, which not only soured the temper, but jaundiced the visual organs of its victim: which, by a magic more potent than the cup of Circe, transformed some thirty millions of human creatures into two-legged pigs,' and selected, as a specimen of the brave and hardy followers of Suvorof, the unfortunate invalid who keeps guard at the beginning of the 21st chapter of his former volume. In the present, we have no such bitterness of complaint, no such violence of invective; nor does the tyranny of Djezzar Pasha at Acre, or of the Flea-king at Tiberias disturb the good-humoured pleasantry of the narrator. The first symptom of this amendment we discovered in his account of Constantinople; the peculiarities of which place, and of its suburbs, had prepared us for some of that strong encaustic painting in which their northern neighbours had been represented; and which could hardly, we thought, escape the chastisement of the same gravis thyrsus' which had visited Mosco with so much rigour. Here, however, our traveller experienced the mock beatitade pronounced on those who expect nothing; and so far from L 2 being |