in Egypt (so far went the assertion of Egyptian priests), while Paris carried off a phantom in her shape, for which thing of air Greeks and Trojans fought ten years long. By this evasion the heroine's virtue is rescued, and Menelaus who (to make good the ridicule Aristophanes flings upon Euripides's mendicant heroes) enters in tatters and as a beggar, is set quite at ease. But this is a species of improvement upon mythology which makes it like the tales in the Thousand and One Nights.

"Rhesus" (for which the Eleventh Book of the Iliad lent the materials) is a play to which modern philologists have devoted whole dissertations to prove it not genuine. Their opinion is, that the play contains a multitude of improprieties and contradictions, and is therefore unworthy of Euripides. This inference is questionable. What if the defects they reprehend arise from the untoward nature of the subject itself, a nocturnal feat of arms, and were wellnigh unavoidable when once the poet had thought fit to choose such a subject for his play? In fact, the question as to the genuineness of a work turns much less upon its merits or demerits, than upon the point of fact, whether it evidences the style and peculiarities of the alleged author. The Scholiast in a few words goes to the root of the matter in quite a different way: "Some have held this piece not to be a genuine production of Euripides, because it exhibits more of the Sophoclean style. Nevertheless in the Didascaliæ it is superscribed as genuine, and the accuracy in regard of the phenomena of the starry heavens betokens the hand of Euripides." I think also I understand what is here meant by the "Sophoclean style," which indeed I find, not in the plan of the whole, but in single passages. Therefore, if Euripides's claim to the work must be negatived, I would conjecture the author to have been some eclectic imitator, but rather of the school of Sophocles than of Euripides, and indeed only a little posterior to either. This I infer from the familiar style of many of the scenes, Tragedy verging at that time towards the drama of common life: for afterwards in the Alexandrine age it fell into the opposite extreme, into bombast.

The Cyclop is a satyric drama. This was a composite variety of tragic poetry, as we have already mentioned in passing. The necessity of a relaxation of the spirits after the engrossing earnestness of Tragedy seems to have given rise to this

kind of drama, and indeed to the afterpiece in general. The Satyric Drama never occupied the ground alone, but was thrown in by way of appendage to several tragedies together, and likewise, so far as all conjecture goes, was always considerably shorter. Its outward cut was like that of Tragedy, the materials were also mythological. The distinctive badge was a chorus composed of satyrs, which accompanied with lively songs, gesticulations and antics, such adventures of the heroes as in themselves had a touch of mirthfulness, (as is the case with many in the Odyssee, for the germ of this, as of so many other species of poetry, is to be found in Homer) or at least were susceptible of a ludicrous turn. The proximate occasion was afforded by the festivals of Bacchus, at which the Satyr's-mask was a common mummery. In mythological stories which Bacchus had nothing to do with, these his constant attendants could be introduced only in a kind of arbitrary manner, and yet not altogether without propriety. As Nature in her original freedom seemed to Grecian fancy to teem everywhere with a marvellous progeny, the wild landscapes, where the scene of these plays was commonly laid, far from the cultivation of civilized towns, might allowably be peopled with these sylvan beings and enlivened by their animal frolics. The composition of demigods with demibeasts formed a diverting contrast. How the poets managed them, we have an example in "The Cyclop." It is not unentertaining, though its actual contents are little more than we already had in the Odyssee; only the jokes of Silenus and his crew turn out rather coarse at whiles. We must confess indeed, that to us the chief value of this work is its rarity, being the only extant one of its kind. doubt Æschylus, in his satyric plays, jested more daringly and with more matter in his merriment; -for instance, when he introduced Prometheus bringing down fire from heaven to rude lumpish man; and Sophocles, as one may conjecture even from the few extant specimens, more gracefully and decently; as, for example, where he introduced the goddesses contending for the prize of beauty, or Nausicaa affording her protection to the shipwrecked Ulysses. It is a speaking trait of the light easy character of Grecian life, which knew nothing of stiff dignity, and, artist-like, admired aptness and gracefulness even in the most insignificant particulars, that in this play entitled

Without

"Nausicaa," or "The Washerwomen," in which (as Homer relates) the princess, after the washing is done, amuses herself with a game of ball with her maidens, Sophocles himself played at ball, and gained great applause for his graceful adroitness in this exercise. The great poet, the revered citizen of Athens, the man who perhaps had been a general, came publicly forward in woman's clothes, and as on account of the weakness of his voice he certainly did not play the leading part of Nausicaa, took the secondary and perhaps mute character of a maid, to impart to the exhibition of his work the slight ornament of bodily agility.

With Euripides, so far as we are concerned, the history of ancient Tragedy comes to an end, though there were many subsequent tragedians, for instance Agathon, whom Aristophanes describes to us as all fragrant with perfumes, and crowned with flowers, and into whose mouth Plato, in his Symposium, puts a speech composed in the taste of the sophist Gorgias, full of the most exquisite elegancies and tautological antitheses. He was the first to forsake mythology, as the natural materials of the drama, and sometimes wrote tragedies with purely fictitious names (this is noticeable as forming a transition to the New Comedy), one of which was called "The Flower," and probably therefore was neither seriously touching nor terrible, but idyllic and pleasing.

The Alexandrine scholars also took to manufacturing tragedies; but if we may form a judgment from the only extant one, Lycophron's "Alexandra," which consists of an interminable monologue full of vaticination and lumbered with obscure mythology, these productions of a would-be-poetical dilettantism were utterly lifeless, untheatrical, and everyway flat and unprofitable. The creative power of the Greeks in this department was so completely defunct, that they were obliged to content themselves with repetition of the old masterpieces.

SIXTH LECTURE.

The Old Comedy explained as forming the complete antithesis to Tragedy. Parody. The Comic Ideal, the exact converse of the Tragic. Sportive caprice. Allegorical and especially Political meaning. The Chorus and its Parabases. Aristophanes. His character as a poet. Description and critique of his extant works.

WE leave Tragic Poetry, to occupy ourselves with a diametrically opposite species, the Old Comedy. Amid its striking dissimilarity we shall however perceive a kind of symmetry in the contrast, and certain relations of the one to the other, which serve to exhibit the essence of both in a clearer light. In forming a judgment of the Old Comedy, we must, in the first place, dismiss from our thoughts all considerations of that which among the moderns is called Comedy, and indeed bore the name among the Greeks themselves at a later period. These two differ, not in mere accidents (as for instance in the introduction of real persons by name in the Old Comedy), but essentially and diametrically. We must also take care not to regard the Old Comedy as the rude beginnings of the more cultivated species of later times', as many have been led to do by its unbridled freedom; on the contrary, this is the genuine type of the species, and the newer variety, as I shall shew in due course, is Comedy let down to prose and reality. The Old Comedy may be most rightly conceived as forming the thorough antithesis to Tragedy. This was perhaps the meaning of that assertion of Socrates's, mentioned by Plato at the end of his Symposium. He relates namely, how after the other guests were dispersed or had fallen asleep, Socrates was left awake with

1. This is the general purport of Barthelemy's section in the Anacharsis on the Old Comedy, one of the poorest and most bungling of his work. It is in the pitiable overweening of ignorance, that Voltaire (among others, in his philosophical dictionary, Art. Athée) passes sentence of condemnation upon Aristophanes, and that most of the modern French critics have followed his example. But the basis of all the nonsensical opinions of the moderns on this subject, and their heavy prosaic manner of viewing it, may be found in Plutarch's parallel between Aristophanes and Menander.

only Aristophanes and Agathon; and, while he drank with them out of a large bowl, constrained them to confess, however unwillingly, that it is the province of one and the same man to excel alike in tragic and comic poetry, and that the tragedian by virtue of his art is a comedian also. This contradicted both the prevailing opinion, which entirely separated the two kinds of talent, and all experience, inasmuch as no tragedian had ever even attempted to shine in comedy, nor conversely: and therefore it could only relate to the abstract essence of the thing. At another time the Platonic Socrates says (again speaking of comic imitation), "all contrasted things whatsoever cannot be properly understood but by and through each other; the serious, therefore, not without the ridiculous." Had it pleased the divine Plato, in working out that dialogue, to communicate his own or his master's thoughts upon these two kinds of poetry, the following investigation might doubtless have been dispensed with.

One aspect of the relation of comic to tragic poetry may be comprehended under the idea of parody. But this parody is an infinitely stronger one than that of the mock-heroic poem, because the subject parodied had, by means of its stage-representation, quite another kind of reality and bodily presence in the mind itself to what the Epos had, which related stories of the olden time as past, and receded with them into remote antiquity. The comic parody was brought out just when the thing parodied was fresh in people's recollection, and even the circumstance of its being exhibited on the same stage on which people were wont to see its serious antitype must needs add to the effect. Moreover, the parody extended not merely to single passages, but took in the entire form of tragic poetry; and doubtless not only the poetry, but the very music and dance, the gesticulation, costume, and scenery were all parodied. Nay, in so far as the tragic stage-art followed in the train of sculpture, the comic parody was aimed at this too: that is to say, it took the ideal forms of the gods, and transformed them into caricature, yet in such a way as they might be easily recognized1. Now the more strikingly the productions of these

1. As an example of this, I refer to the well-known vase-painting, in which Jupiter and Mercury, about to ascend by a ladder into Alcmene's chamber, are represented as comic masks.