Situation, scenery, language, are here all more complex.

The first Adventure was almost Greek in its radiant and moving simplicity; the last is Titanically Browningesque, a riot of the least Hellenic elements of Browning's mind with the uptorn fragments of the Hellenic world.

Moreover, the issue is far from being equally clear.

The glory of Euripides is still the ostensible theme; but Aristophanes had so many points of contact with Browning himself, and appeals in his defence to so many root-ideas of Browning's own, that the reader hesitates between the poet to whom Browning's imagination allied him, and the poet whom his taste preferred.

His Aristophanes is, like himself, the poetry of "Life," a broad and generous realist, who like Lippo Lippi draws all existence into his art; an enemy of all asceticisms and abstractions, who drives his meaning home through vivid concrete example and drastic phrase, rather than by enunciating the impressive moral commonplaces of tragic poetry.[59] Aristophanes, too, had been abused for his "unintelligible" poetry,--"mere psychologic puzzling,"[60]--by a "chattering" public which preferred the lilt of nursery rhymes.