To analyze in detail a work of art so well known to all students as the _Birds_ would be needless. It is enough to notice in passing that it is quite unique of its kind, combining, as it does, such airy fancies as we find in the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_ with the peculiar pungency of Aristophanic satire, untainted by the obscenity which forms an integral part of the _Ecclesiazusæ_ or _Lysistrata_. Most exquisite is the art with which Aristophanes has collected all the facts of ornithology, all the legends and folklore connected with birds, so as to create a fanciful birdland and atmosphere of true bird life for his imaginary beings. Not less wonderful is the imagination with which he has conceived the whole universe from the bird's point of view, his sympathy with the nightingale, the drollery of his running footman Trochilus, the pompous gravity of his King Epops, and so on through the whole of his winged _dramatis personæ_. The triumph of his art is the Parabasis, in which the birds pour forth melodious compassion for the transitory earth-born creatures of an hour. Poor men, with their little groping lives! The epithets of pity which the happier birds invent to describe man are woven, as it were, of gossamer and dew, symbols of fragility. Then the music changes as the vision of winged Eros, up-soaring from the primeval windegg, bursts upon the fancy of the Chorus. Again it subsides into still more delicate irony, when the just reign of the birds on earth and over heaven is prophesied; and the whole concludes with semichorus answering to semichorus in antiphonal strains of woodland poetry and satire--the sweet notes of the flute responded to by shouts of Bacchic laughter.