The classical mask of the first comic old man was drawn excessively mild and benevolent, to indicate that propensity for scattering purses among the poor, and bestowing his daughter, with some millions of sesterces, on young Lucius, which were the probable attributes of the Greek and Latin stage veteran. There was also the mask of the testy old man, who was represented perfectly bald, as if he was always taking something or other into his head which had torn all the hair out of it. The masks for comic young men had the ordinary characteristics of stage humour, including red hair, pug noses, broad lips, and raised eyebrows, which are in these days supplied from those recognised sources of dramatic drollery, the burnt cork, the gum-pot, and the paint-box.
We might enumerate a long list of different masks, without introducing any variety, for they were very nearly the same; but we have shown enough to prove that the classical taste for which so many clamour without knowing what they talk about, was very little, if at all, above the modern standard. Some authorities[61] assert that masks were not worn in the earliest representations of the Roman drama; but some of the oldest MS. of Terence contain figures of the required masks, just as a play of the present day has prefixed to it a list of the costumes of the characters. The admirers of the classical may be grieved and astonished to hear that the taste, for the restoration of which they so much pine, took greater delight in the deadly games of the Circus, than in the lively representations of men and manners.
[Illustration: Light Comedy Man of the Period.]
Historical literature was in a very humble condition, and had much, or indeed all, the prolixity, with little of the accuracy, of a modern report for a newspaper. It is, however, hardly fair to judge the authors severely for writings which we have never seen, and are never likely to see; for they have never come down to us, except in scraps--the result of the various cuttings-up they have encountered at the hands of Polybius and other critics. For the same reason, we are unable to praise conscientiously the "Origines" of Cato, which has long ago been lost, and we are unwilling to adopt the "opinions of the press," which have too often been at the disposal of the member of a clique, or of the purchaser of a puffing paragraph. Oratory always was, and always will be, an important art, except in those countries which are so excessively republican and free, that the people are free for every imaginable or imaginary purpose, except to do as they please, and to say what they think proper. The Romans took the art of rhetoric from the Greeks, but even a good thing is distasteful if forced where it is not asked; and, when the Athenians sent three professed orators as propagandists of their art to Rome, the foreign agitators were ordered--very properly--to quit the city.