ABSTRACT
This miserable outline indicates the general drift of Aristophanes. A score of quotations had been marked to illustrate the poet’s style of treatment. But these I, the reviewer, have omitted: for not a sentence in this poem is superfluous; and, wrenched from its context, each passage seems an insult to its author. What praise is greater than this? Mr. Browning is unrivalled in the art of following thought through all its windings, tracing and retracing labyrinths of sophistry and prejudice, blending the specious and the true as he conceives them, the coarse and the refined, spinning with words a closely-fitting veil of gossamer for the spirit he imprisons in his verse. Therefore no poet suffers more from the process of such villainous abbreviation as a taster for the public in a first review is bound to venture on.
