The Artist's Married Life, Being That of Albert Duerer. Tr. by Mrs. J.R. Stodart

The comedies of Terence are pervaded by a conception not more moral, but doubtless more becoming, of the feminine nature and of married life. As a rule, they end with a virtuous marriage, or, if possible, with two - just as it was the glory of Menander that he compensated for every seduction by a marriage. The eulogies of a bachelor life, which are so frequent in Menander, are repeated by his Roman remodeller only with characteristic shyness[4], whereas the lover in his agony, the tender husband at the accouchement, the loving sister by the death-bed in the Eunuchus and the Andria are very gracefully delineated; in the Hecyra there even appears at the close as a delivering angel a virtuous courtesan, likewise a genuine Menandrian figure, which the Roman public, it is true, very properly hissed. In Plautus the fathers throughout only exist for the purpose of being jeered and swindled by their sons; with Terence in the Heauton Timorumenos the lost son is reformed by his father's wisdom, and, as in general he is full of excellent instructions as to education, so the point of the best of his pieces, the Adelphi, turns on finding the right mean between the too liberal training of the uncle and the too rigid training of the father ...»