Page:Acharnians and two other plays (1909).djvu/205

⁠First then, in your empty coffers, you shall see the sterling owl,^[1]1105
From the mines of Laurium, familiar as a common fowl;
Roosting among the bags and pouches, each at ease upon his nest;
Undisturbed, rearing and hatching little broods of interest:
If you wish to cheat in office, but are inexpert and raw,
You should have a kite for agent, capable to gripe and claw;1110
Cranes and Cormorants shall help you, to a stomach and a throat;
When you feast abroad, but, if you give a vile, unfriendly vote,
Hasten and provide yourselves, each, with a little silver plate,
Like the statues of the gods, for the protection of his pate;1115
Else, when forth abroad you ramble, on a summer holiday,
We shall take a dirty vengeance, and befoul your best array.

In the following Scene a foot messenger arrives at full speed from the new city, apparently in a state of great exhaustion. He communicates his important intelligence to Peisthetairus in a single gasp of breath—"Your fortification's finished!" The report which he makes of the building of a new Babylon by the nation of the Birds, as it considerably exceeds even that license of assuming possibilities which is the privilege of the ancient comedy, may lead us to examine the mode of humourous contrivance by which the Author has managed in some degree to maintain that balance between truth and falsehood, which I have (in another place) endeavoured to point out as essential to the character of all dramatic representations whether serious or comic.

The interest which we take in the development of moral truth and in the illustration of human character, is so much stronger than that which we attach to mere matter of fact, that where the two are combined (that is to say, where a supposed fact is made the foundation of a new and striking illustration of character), our attention is, generally speaking, wholly directed to the latter, and we are inclined to take the fact for granted; as we allow the scrawl, which a mathematician draws, to stand for a circle or square, our whole attention being absorbed in the acquisition of a general and a permanent truth. It is, we believe, an established axiom in the art of lying, that almost anything may be made credible of almost any person, provided that the imaginary facts are accompanied by a just representation of the behaviour of the person, such as it might be supposed to be under the alleged circumstances; and this will be more strikingly the case, if some trait of his character, not generally observed, but likely to be

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1. The figure of an owl stamped on the coin of Athens.