Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/173

 *ander, and Philiscus, and Sosiphanes, and Dionysides. All the great comic poets, too, were burned pellmell with these—Telecleides, Hermippus, Eupolis, Antiphanes, Ameipsas, Lysippus, and Menander—"whom nature mimicked," as the phrase was. And here, posting to obliteration, went likewise Thespis, and Pratinas, and Phrynichus—and Choerilus, whom cultured persons had long ranked with Homer. Nothing was to remain of any of these save the bare name, and even this would be known only to pedants. All these, spurred by the poet's ageless monomania, had toiled toward, and had attained, the poet's ageless goal—to write perfectly of beautiful happenings: and of this action's normal by-product, which is immortality in the mouths and minds of succeeding generations, all these were being robbed, by the circumstance that parchment is inflammable.

Here was beauty, and wit, and learning, and genius, being wasted—quite wantonly—never to be recaptured, never to be equaled again (despite the innumerable painstaking penmen destined