Terence at the outset of his career had had a hard, uphill battle to fight and many great difficulties to overcome. The average class of spectator in a Roman theatre was very much the same as that of an ordinary modern crowd—such, for instance, as the collection of the great Unwashed which visits the Crystal Palace on a Bank Holiday. There was certainly a sprinkling of nobility; but, there being no charge for admission, the vast majority belonged to the lower orders. Plautus, with his genuine fun and broad jokes, too often, at least in his imitators, degenerating into obscene buffoonery, had set a fashion which it was next to impossible for after writers to avoid. When, therefore, Cæcilius began to be a little too serious, he at once found it hard to get a hearing; and all, or nearly all, the Terentian prologues contain an entreaty to the audience to listen patiently to the end. And, notwithstanding the savage opposition which was raised, Terence was enabled by the influence and support of the young nobles, Scipio and his following, to keep the even tenor of his way; and he might have boasted, as Aristophanes had done some two and a half centuries before him, of the reformation which he had effected on the stage.

The coarseness of the mimes—popular pantomimic plays—was a most seductive counter-attraction to our author's chaste sobriety. These mimes, Ovid tells us, indecent as they were, were looked at and listened to by many of the Senate, by maidens ripe for marriage, by matrons, by men and by boys. Little wonder, then, that the uneducated crowd, the great Unwashed, found his plays cold. Yet even he has been found fault with for a passage in the Brothers, wherein the one of milder mood, carried away by the intensity of his feeling, expresses in round terms approval of the irregularities of youth. But we cannot too carefully distinguish the artist from the moralist. What he aimed at doing, Terence did well; and this was … to give his Roman audience a more or less faithful picture of society at Athens, as depicted in the plays of the late comedy. If this mode of reasoning were universal, we should be compelled to believe that Euripides sympathised with the sophistries of Odysseus, Shakespeare with the villany of Iago. Nor was the code of morals at a high level; Christianity had not yet touched ethics, and Terence is distinctly above, and not below, the high-water mark.

But his strong point, and an extremely strong point too, is the refined grace, the exquisite finish, the keen point of language and style. He is, indeed, a well of Latin undefiled. The elegant wit, in respect of which he vies with his Attic masters, may well make us marvel how the African slave attained such a thorough command over a language not his own. The old Greek proverb 'Nothing in excess' was never more effectively illustrated than in his writings; and throughout he approaches the severe beauty of Greek sculpture. Plautus sometimes verges upon buffoonery, Terence never. And it was, in fact, this perfection of style which laid him open to the calumny—if calumny it were—of being assisted by noble friends in the production of his plays.

With regard to their treatment of the Greek originals, whereas Plautus took little but the bare outline and filled it up from his own fertile imagination, Terence preserved with much more accuracy the Greek colouring: he never sends his dead bodies through the Metian gate at Rome, and his allusions to Roman customs are sparing, though by no means absent. If, however, he imitates the Greek at all closely, like Virgil, he borrows in so masterly a manner as to make the theft his own. 'Ars est celare artem;' and herein he most undeniably succeeds. If we had not known it in other ways, most assuredly his style would never have betrayed to us the fact that his work is not altogether original.

And yet Cæsar's epigram charging him with want of comic force is to some extent true; and it would be unjust to say that he has the freshness or power of Plautus. But humour of a keen, dry kind he has in plenty. If we may be allowed to make a comparison, he bears, roughly speaking, the same relation to Plautus that Thackeray, as a satirist, bears to Dickens. If he has less broad fun, he has as much pointed humour, and certainly greater delicacy of treatment. Plautus, as Horace tells us, imitated the bustle of Epicharmus; Terence's plays are all statariœ. Like Sophocles, he has the true dramatic tact of making each scene not only good in itself, but also conducive to the general action of the play; and he has a strong vein of that 'irony' which in dramatic excellence is so necessary a factor.

With regard to his want of originality, this he does not, any more than other Roman writers, attempt to conceal. When his enemies accuse him of plagiarism, he sets to the disproving of the charge not by attempting to show that the passage in question is his own, but that he has translated it word for word from the Greek. To this a rather curious parallel has occurred in our own times, when an adaptation from the French may be described as 'new.' And just so the Mother-in-Law, when reproduced a second or even third time, could still be called 'new.'

We have already said that the six comedies have come down to us in a condition more or less satisfactory. Yet perhaps Ritschl is not overstating the truth when he alleges that there is hardly a scene of the Terentian plays in which there is not some serious flaw, even after the labours of Bentley. We have, however, a most excellent manuscript, an uncial of not later than the fifth century of our era, known as the Bembine from having once belonged to the celebrated Cardinal Pietro Bembo. It is sadly mutilated, and has received shameful treatment even in comparatively modern times; but it is the only manuscript copy of Terence, not even excepting the Victorian—and many hundreds of such copies exist—which is not disfigured by the wholesale corruptions and interpolations of the unknown grammarian Calliopius. Unfortunately, one authority of undoubted value we are not able confidently to use. Donatus, a distinguished grammarian at Rome during the fourth century, besides preserving to us a life of Terence which he ascribes to Suetonius, wrote a full commentary on his plays. But the commentary is in so corrupt a state that it is out of our power to collect, so to speak, the scattered limbs. And yet a better edition might be made than has yet appeared, for after the lapse of centuries still the least bad edition is the editio princeps brought out at Rome by Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz in the year A.D. 1472!

From his own day to our times the study of Terence has never languished; the early fathers of the Church read and studied him, and Erasmus learnt all the plays by heart. But slowly and surely the character of the text degenerated; and not until the famous edition of the 'British Aristarchus.' Richard Bentley, was any decided improvement made in this direction.

[To] end by the words of Melanchthon: 'I exhort all schoolmasters with all boldness to commend this author to the zealous study of youth. For I think that from him more help is gained for forming a judgment concerning the manners of men than from most works of philosophers. Nor will any other writer teach greater elegance in speaking, or steep the tongue of a boy in eloquence of a more useful kind.'