people, who without such help could appreciate their subtle, compressed, and elaborate art; and it is certain that in those times such help, if obtained at all, was obtained not by way of reading but by way of talk.
With regard to Euripides in particular we have express evidence to show how strong was the stimulus applied by his writings to literary and critical conversation as a means of mutual teaching, with what eager zest, all the stronger doubtless for the flavour of 'impiety' and rebellion, the younger men especially scrutinized and analysed his 'lessons in chatter', and spent in measuring his phrases 'with rule and square' the hours when, as people past learning would remark with a snarl, 'they ought to have been in the gymnasium'. Nor should we omit to notice, what even our unfriendly witness has the fairness to add, that these circles then proved themselves—as where such exist they do still—the most efficient of intellectual schools, shaping sometimes, out of the rudest material which that extraordinary sea-port could furnish, debaters so sure and so ready that, to the horror of men bred in a different discipline, they were not unwilling to 'answer an official speaker'![1] While thinkers of graver complexion and more catholic taste, men upon whose minds had dawned the notion of what is now called 'liberal scholarship', were forming parties, such as those ascribed to Socrates by the writer of his memoirs[2], for the study of 'the old wits', it was over the productions of the day, and of that author above all who most exactly answered to the taste of the day, that the mass of ambitious youths enchanted themselves in the exchange of notions. Aided by the lively picture of Aristophanes we may even now ourselves be present for a moment in such a circle, while copies (as we may suppose) of the master's latest deliverance, imperfect probably and pieced out with recollections, are passing from hand to hand, and the excited disputants are displaying their ingenuity in extracting the moral lesson from the intricacies of the dialogue. We may hear their queries and challenges, 'What is the meaning of this?…And pray where is that?…Now who took this?' and so on. We may hear also the growl of the impatient senior—Aristophanes himself had probably played the part on occasion
