Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE LADIES IN PARLIAMENT. A FRAGMENT AFTER THE MANNER OF AN OLD ATHENIAN COMEDY. - THE Ladies In Parliament was composed during the great agitation which followed the rejection of Mr. Gladstone's Reform Bill of 1866. The piece was at first intended to be a modern and decent Ecclesiazusae : not such an imitation as would satisfy the scholar; but such as would give to him who, for want of a better, goes by the name of the general reader, some notion of how a Greek Comedian might have written, when at his very worst, if he had lived in the days of chignons and female suffrage. The idea of producing something that should be Aristophanic from end to end fell through; chiefly, no doubt, from the inability of the author: but in part also because the simplicity which is so quaint and pretty in Attic becomes childish in English. Nor should it be forgotten that London society is too large to admit that minuteness of allusion which was possible in days when a small and highly cultivated community supplied the poet with his materials and his audience. There is, however, one passage which reflects something of the old Greek manner; that namely which begins " We much revere our sires;" in which an attempt has been made to mimic the jovial conservatism which goes rollicking through the long swinging metres of Aristophanes. Care has likewise been taken to preserve in these lines that utter contempt of dates, that highminded indifference to the unities of time, which he shares with every burlesque writer who is worth his salt. For instance, the old militia-men who have turned out to besiege Lysistrata and her accomplices represent themselves as having taken part in ejecting Cleomenes, the Lacedaemonian king, from the Acropolis: an event which occurred ninety-nine years before the comedy was ...