There is a veil of grandeur or of divinity over other grotesques.

Polyphemus is a giant, Midas a king, Silenus a god.
Thus comedy is almost imperceptible in the great epic _ensemble_ of ancient times.

What is the barrow of Thespis beside the Olympian chariots?
What are Aristophanes and Plautus, beside the Homeric colossi, AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides?
Homer bears them along with him, as Hercules bore the pygmies, hidden in his lion's skin! In the idea of men of modern times, however, the grotesque plays an enormous part.

It is found everywhere; on the one hand it creates the abnormal and the horrible, on the other the comic and the burlesque.
It fastens upon religion a thousand original superstitions, upon poetry a thousand picturesque fancies.

It is the grotesque which scatters lavishly, in air, water, earth, fire, those myriads of intermediary creatures which we find all alive in the popular traditions of the Middle Ages; it is the grotesque which impels the ghastly antics of the witches' revels, which gives Satan his horns, his cloven foot and his bat's wings.