always breathe purity of sentiment, but is stained with the mixture of violent and degrading passions. This, however, was the fault of the age, rather than of the poet, although he is generally represented as an enemy of the female sex; and his death was ascribed to a judgment of Venus.

"When blood-hounds met him by the way, And monsters made the bard their prey.' This great dramatist was less successful than Sophocles in the construction of his plots; and, instead of the happy expedients by which his predecessor introduces us to the business of the drama, he had too often recourse to the mediation of a prologue, who came forth to explain, in detail, the previous history necessary to understand the piece.

Euripides is also accused of having degraded the character of his personages, by admitting more alloy of human weakness, folly, and vice, than was consistent with the high qualities of the heroic age. Eschylus, it was said, transported his audience into a new and more sublime race of beings; Sophocles painted mankind as they ought to be, and Euripides as they actually are. Yet the variety of character introduced by the latter tragedian, and the interest of his tragedies, must always attract the modern reader, coloured as they are by a tone of sentiment, and by his knowledge of the business, rules, and habits, of actual life, to which his predecessors, living as they did, in an imaginary and heroical world of their own, appear to have been strangers. And although the judgment of the ancients assigned the preeminence in tragedy to Eschylus or Sophocles, yet Euripides has been

found more popular with posterity than either of his two great predecessors.

The division betwixt tragedy and comedy, for both sprung from the same common origin, the feasts, namely, in honour of Bacchus, and the disguises adopted by his worshippers, seems to have taken place gradually until the jests and frolics, which made a principal part of these revels, were found misplaced when introduced with graver matter, and were made by Susarion, perhaps, the subject of a separate province of the Drama. The Grecian comedy was divided into the ancient, the middle, and the modern, style of composition.

The ancient and original comedy was of a kind which may, at first sight, appear to derogate from the religious purposes which we have pointed out as the foundation of the Drama. The writings under this head frequently turn upon parodies, in which the persons and adventures of those gods and heroes who were the sublime subjects of the tragic Drama, are introduced for the purpose of buffoon-sport, and ridicule, as in Carey's modern farces of Midas and the Golden Pippin. Hercules appears in one of those pieces astonishing his host by an extravagant appetite, which the cook in vain attempts to satiate, by placing before him, in succession, all the various Idishes which the ancient kitchen afforded. In another comedy, Bacchus (in whose honour the solemnity was instituted) is brought in only in order to ridicule his extreme cowardice.

At other times, allowing a grotesque fancy its wildest range, the early comic authors introduced

upon the stage animals, and even inanimate things, as part of their dramatis persona, and embodied forth on the stage, the fantastic imaginations of Lucian in his True History. The golden age was represented in the same ridiculous and bizarre mode of description as the Pays de la Cocagne of the French minstrels, or the popular ideas of Lubberland in England: and the poets furnished kingdoms of birds and worlds in the moon.

Had the only charm of these entertainments consisted in the fantastic display with which the eyes of the spectators were regaled at the expense of the over-excited imagination of the poet, they would soon have fallen into disuse; for the Athenians were too acute aud judicious critics, to have been long gratified with mere extravagance. But these grotesque scenes were made the medium for throwing the most bold and daring ridicule upon the measures of the state, upon the opinions of individuals, and upon the religion of the country.

This propensity to turn into ridicule that which is most serious and sacred, had probably its origin in the rude gambols of the silvan deities who accompanied Bacchus, and to whose petulant and lively demeanour rude jest was a natural accompaniment. The audience, at least the more ignorant part of them, saw these parodies with pleasure, which equalled the awe they felt at the performance of the tragedies, whose most solemn subjects were thus burlesqued; nor do they appear to have been checked by any sense that their mirth was profane. In fact, when the religion of a nation comes to consist chiefly in the practice of a few unmeaning cere

monies, it is often found that the populace, with whatever inconsistency, assume the liberty of profaning them by grotesque parodies, without losing their reverence for the superstitions which they thus vilify. Customs of a like tendency were common in the middle ages. The festival of the Ass in France, of the Boy-Bishop in England, of the Abbot of Unreason in Scotland,1 and many other popular practices of the same kind, exhibited, in countries yet Catholic, daring parodies of the most sacred services and ceremonies of the Roman Church. And as these were practised openly, and under authority, without being supposed to shake the people's attachment to the rites which they thus ridiculed, we cannot wonder that similar profanities were well received among the Pagans, whose religion sat very loosely upon them, and who professed no fixed or necessary articles of faith.

It is probable, that, had the old Grecian comedy continued to direct its shafts of ridicule only against the inhabitants of Olympus, it would not have attracted the coercion of the magistracy. But its kingdom was far more extensive, and the poets claiming the privilege of laying their opinions on public affairs before the people in this shape, Cratinus, Eupolis, and particularly Aristophanes, a daring, powerful, and apparently unprincipled writer, converted comedy into an engine for assailing the credit and character of private individuals, as

1 [See these Saturnalia described in D'ISRAELI'S Curiosities of Literature, vol. iii.-of the Abbot of Unreason at greater length, and with more of graphic illustration, in the romance of The Abbot, Waverley Novels, vol. xx., ch. 14, 15.]

well as the persons and political measures of those who administered the state. The doctrines of philosophy, the power of the magistrate, the genius of the poet, the rites proper to the Deity, were alternately made the subject of the most uncompromising and severe satire. It was soon discovered, that the more directly personal the assault could be made, and the more revered or exalted the personage, the greater was the malignant satisfaction of the audience, who loved to see wisdom, authority, and religious reverence, brought down to their own level, and made subjects of ridicule by the powers of the merciless satirist. The use of the mask enabled Aristophanes to render his satire yet more pointedly personal; for, by forming it so as to imitate, probably with some absurd exaggeration, the features of the object of his ridicule, and by imitating the dress and manner of the original, the player stepped upon the stage, a walking and. speaking caricature of the hero of the night, and was usually placed in some ludicrous position, amidst the fanciful and whimsical chimeras with which the scene was peopled.

In this manner, Aristophanes ridiculed with equal freedom Socrates, the wisest of the Athenians, and Cleon, the demagogue, when at the height of his power. As no one durst perform the latter part, for fear of giving offence to one so powerful, the author acted Cleon himself, with his face smeared with the lees of wine. Like the satire of Rabelais, the political and personal invective of Aristophanes was mingled with a plentiful allowance of scurril and indecent jests, which were calcu