With this incident the fable naturally concludes, and it is perhaps to be regretted that Terence had not also ended the drama with the third scene of the fifth act, where Demea breaks in upon the entertainment. The conversion of Demea, indeed, with which the remaining scenes are occupied, grows out of the preceding events. He had met, during the course of the play, with many mortifications—his anger, complaints, and advice, had been all neglected and slighted—he had seen his brother loved and followed, and found himself shunned; but such a change in long-confirmed habits could hardly have been effected in so short a period, or by a single lesson, however striking and important. His complaisance, too, is awkward, and his generosity is evidently about to run into profusion.
But if all this be an impropriety, what shall we say of the gross absurdity of Micio, a bachelor of sixty-five, marrying an old woman, the mother of Æschinus’ bride, (and whom he had never seen but once,) merely out of complaisance to his friends, who seemed to have no motive in making the request, except that she was quite solitary, had nobody to care for her, and was long past child-bearing—
—— “Parere jam diu hæc per annos non potest: Nec, qui eam respiciat, quisquam est; sola est.”
Micio had all along been represented as possessed of so much judgment, good sense, and knowledge of the world, that this last piece of extravagance destroys the interest we had previously felt in the character. Donatus, who has given us some curious information in his excellent commentary on Terence, with regard to the manner in which he had altered his comedies from the original Greek, says, that in the play of Menander, the old Bachelor has no reluctance at entering into a state of matrimony.—“Apud Menandrum, Senex de nuptiis non gravatur.” The English translator of Terence thinks, that the Latin poet, by making Micio at first express a repugnance to the proposed match, has improved on his model; but it appears to me, that this only makes his unbounded complaisance more improbable and ridiculous. Indeed the incongruity and inconsistence of the concluding scenes of the _Adelphi_, have been considered so great, that a late German translator of Terence has supposed that they did not form a component part of the regular comedy, but were in fact the _Exodium_, a sort of afterpiece, in which the characters of the preceding play were usually represented in grotesque situations, and with overcharged colours(310).