I have so
        little sympathy that I cannot understand how anyone can ever have taken
        any interest in them whatever. Their highest flights to me are dull,
        pompous and artificial productions, which if they were to appear now for
        the first time would, I should think, either fall dead or be severely
        handled by the critics. I wish to know whether it is I who am in fault
        in this matter, or whether part of the blame may not rest with the
        tragedians themselves.
            How far, I wonder, did the Athenians genuinely like these poets, and
        how far was the applause which was lavished upon them due to fashion or
        affectation? How far, in fact, did admiration for the orthodox
        tragedians take that place among the Athenians which going to church
        does among ourselves?
            This is a venturesome question considering the verdict now generally
        given for over two thousand years, nor should I have permitted myself to
        ask it if it had not been suggested to me by one whose reputation stands
        as high, and has been sanctioned for as long time, as those of the
        tragedians themselves - I mean by Aristophanes.
            Numbers, weight of authority and time have conspired to place
        Aristophanes on as high a literary pinnacle as any ancient writer, with
        the exception perhaps of Homer, but he makes no secret of heartily
        hating Euripides and Sophocles, and I strongly suspect only praises
        Æschylus that he may run down the other two with greater impunity. For
        after all there is no such difference between -Æschylus and his
        successors as will render the former very good, and the latter very bad;
        and the thrusts at Æschylus which Aristophanes puts into the mouth of
        Euripides go too well home to have been written by an admirer.
            It may be observed that while Euripides accuses Æschylus of being
        pomp-bundle- worded - which I suppose means bombastic and given to
        rhodomontade, Æschylus retorts on Euripides that he is 'a gossip
        gleaner, a describer of beggars, and a rag stitcher' - from which it may
        be inferred that he was truer to the life of his own times than Æschylus
        was. It happens, however, that a faithful rendering of contemporary life
        is the very quality which gives its most permanent interest to any work
        of fiction, whether in literature or painting, and it is a not unnatural
        consequence that while only seven plays by Æschylus and the same number
        by Sophocles have come down to us, we have no fewer than nineteen by
        Euripides.
            This however is a digression; the question before us is whether
        Aristophanes really liked Æschylus or only pretended to do so. It must
        be remembered that the claims of Æschylus, Sophocles