With the end of the Persian Wars, the original object of ostracism was removed, but it continued in use for forty years and was revived in 417 B.C. It now became a mere party weapon and the farcical result of its use in 417 in the case of Hyperbolus led to its abolition either at once, or, as Lugebil seeks to prove, in the archonship of Euclides (403 B.C.).

Early in that year was begun The Wrong Box, a farcical romance in which Mr Lloyd Osbourne participated; Stevenson also began a romance about the Indian Mutiny, which he abandoned.

The king, after a somewhat farcical occupation of Rome, which had been evacuated by the French, hurried back to Naples as soon as the French attacked his troops, and although the lazzaroni (the lowest class of the people) were devoted to the dynasty and ready to defend it, he fled with the court to Palermo in a panic on board Nelson's ships.

Fleury, Rabelais is a sober reformer, an apostle of earnest work, of sound education, of rational if not dogmatic religion, who wraps up his morals in a farcical envelope partly to make them go down with the vulgar and partly to shield himself from the consequences of his reforming zeal.

Those who in the same way identify Rabelais with Panurge can never explain the education scheme, the solemn apparition of Gargantua among the farcical and fantastic variations on Panurge's wedding, and many other passages; while, on the other hand, those who insist on a definite propaganda of any kind must justify themselves by their own power of seeing things invisible to plain men.