“Brekekekex, coax, coax, brekekekex, coax, coax.”

In “The Birds,” the songsters of the woods are frequently heard trilling their lays.  As they were only befeathered men, this must have been a somewhat comic performance.  The king of birds, transformed from Tereus, King of Thrace, twitters in the following style.

“Epopopopopopopopopopoi! io! io! come, come, come, come, come.  Tio, tio, tio, tio, tio, tio, tio! trioto, trioto, totobrix!  Torotorotorotorolix!  Ciccabau, ciccabau!  Torotorotorotorotililix.”

Rapidity of utterance was also aimed at in some parts of the choruses, and sometimes very long words had to be pronounced without pause—­such as green-grocery-market-woman, and garlic-bread-selling-hostesses.  At the end of the Ecclesiazusae, there is a word of twenty-seven syllables—­a receipt for a mixture—­as multifarious in its contents as a Yorkshire pie.

We may conclude that there was a humour in tone as well as of rhythm in fashion before the time of Aristophanes, and we read that there was a certain ventriloquist named Eurycles; but Aristophanes must be content to bear the reproach of having been the first to introduce punning.  He probably had accomplices among his contemporaries, but they have been lost in obscurity.  Playing with words seems to have commenced very early.  The organs of speech are not able to produce any great number of entirely different sounds, as is proved by the paucity of the vowels and consonants we possess.  To increase the vocabulary, syllables are grouped together by rapid utterance, and distinctions of time were made.  Similarities in the length and flow of words began soon to be noticed, and hence arose the idea of parallelism, that is of poetry—­a similarity of measure.  A likeness in the tone of words, in the vowel and consonant sounds, was afterwards observed, and became the foundation of punning.  The difference between rhythm and puns is partly that of degree—­and the latter were originally regarded as poetical.  Simonides of Ceos called Jupiter Aristarchus, i.e., the best of rulers; and AEschylus spoke of Helen as a “hell,"[13] but neither of them intended to be facetious.  Aristotle ranked such conceits among the ornaments of style; and we do not until much later times find them regarded as ludicrous.

With Aristophanes they are humorous, and his ingenuity in representing things as the same because their names were so, would not have been unworthy of a modern burlesque writer.  They, perhaps, were more appreciated at that time from their appearing less common and less easily made.  But there is a worse direction than any above mentioned, in which Aristophanes truckled to the low taste of his day.  The modern reader is shocked and astounded at the immense amount of indelicacy contained in his works.  It ranges from the mild impropriety of saying that a girl dances as nimbly as a flea in a sheepskin, or of naming those other industrious little creatures he euphemistically calls