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This is commonly translated, “that it is no wonder, that you defend your brother:” but it is a more insulting speech of Phormio, alluding to the miserable condition, to which Chremes was reduced by Demipho's advice. Thus, in the foregoing scene, Phormio says, much in the same spirit,

Exsequias Chremeti, &c. What creates the drollery of this speech is, that Phormio here makes use of the same terms, which it was customary to use at the proclamation of Funerals—L. Titio exsequias ire cui commodum est, jam tempus est, ollus defertur.

Mactatum infortunis. There is an elegant humour in the combination of these words; mactatum being a term used at sacrifices.

These three last scenes [the same that compose the fifth act in this translation] are perhaps the most beautiful of any in the Phormio; yet Guyetus has declared such a cruel war against them, that he cuts them off at one stroke, without giving quarter to so much as a single verse: but it is impossible not to say, that this is rather the disgust of a sick man, than the wholesome delicacy of a judicious critick.

This remark of Madam Dacier is as just as it is elegant, and the false delicacy of Guyetus is as inconsistent as it is ill founded. For if he considered these scenes as superfluous, those, which here compose the fourth act, are superfluous also; and the play should end with the interview between Chremes and Sophrona; for when Phanium is discovered to be his daughter, nobody can doubt of her being permitted to remain the wife of Antipho, since it is the very thing which the two old gentlemen were labouring to bring about. But the truth is, that Terence in this play has displayed an address something similar to that observed by Mons. Diderot in the Self-Tormentor; for though Chremes has discovered his daughter himself, yet he is particularly anxious to conceal that incident from every personage in the Comedy, except Demipho; and the gradual unfolding that circumstance to all the other characters of the play gives the poet an opportunity of continuing his piece with all that humour and pleasantry, with which we see he has accomplished it: and his uncommon art in thus adding to the interest of his Comedy, instead of suffering it to languish, after so important a discovery, is worthy our particular observation. These scenes have indeed generally procured our poet the approbation of the severest criticks. Bentley, in the last note to the fourth act, speaks of them in the handsomest terms, and is so far from endeavouring to bring them within “the proscribing hook,” that he declares Guyetus to be an absolute madman for his unmerciful sentence of amputation.

But though there are few readers, who would not on this occasion concur in the opinion of Bentley and Dacier, yet I do not think that this Comedy has in general received the encomiums it deserves. The plot indeed, being double, is so far faulty; and the story of Phanium and Antipho would certainly of itself afford sufficient materials for a Comedy, without the episode of Phædria and the Musick-Girl. It must however be acknowledged that, allowing that episode, the construction of the fable is extremely artful, and contains a vivacity of intrigue perhaps even superior to that of the Eunuch, particularly in the Catastrophe. The diction is pure and elegant, and the first act as chastly written as that of the Self-Tormentor itself. The character of Phormio is, as Donatus has observed, finely separated from that of Gnatho, and is, I think, better drawn than that of any Parasite in Plautus. Nausistrata is a lively sketch of a shrewish wife, as well as Chremes an excellent draught of an hen-pecked husband, and more in the stile of the modern drama than perhaps any character in antient comedy, except the Miser of Plautus. On the whole, if Terence copied as closely from his original in this play, as he is supposed to have done in the four which he drew from Menander, it must give us no mean opinion of the dramatick merits of Apollodorus.

Moliere has given us a contemptible travestie of this excellent comedy in his miserable farce of Les Fourberies de Scapin, “The Cheats of Scapin.” It would be too injurious to the memories both of Terence and Moliere to enter into any particular comparison between the two pieces. I shall therefore conclude these notes with the well-known lines of Boileau.