their appearance upon a modern stage, they must, alas! go through the tortures of addition and subtraction until they are no longer recognizable. Their simplicity sets the seal of condemnation upon them until they are bedizened with tinsel and endowed with meretricious charms. Moreover, these copies of Greek models are themselves weak, forced into a semblance of life and not naturally born. They are not the result of a poetic impulse, but the experiment of a cultivated reason.

The same charge can be made to some degree against the translations of the ancient tragedy. The Greek language is gone, and the life fails. The only hope of a perfect translation is not in the Greek scholar, but in the poet of Greek type.

The modern theatre is a disgrace to the old nobility of the name. Amusement of a low order, set in a surrounding of vice, describes it. In Athens the theatre was the place of high instruction, accompanied by all the proprieties of life. Comedy, it is true, made inroads into this definition, but the change was confined to the stage. Women never acted at Athens, nor in comedy were they seen in the theatre. There was a sacredness that rested over the great Dionysan edifice in the eyes of an Attic audience, which rendered it as inappropriate for vicious indulgence, as a church would appear to a modern. The opera is often suggested as offering a resemblance to the high Greek drama, and the likeness is certainly far happier than that of the sorry theatre of the day. But here, too, a gulf of difference sadly mars the comparison. The presence of music and the idealized drama are points of union, but the predominance of music, almost monopolizing the expression, brings down the object of the performance from the region of instruction to that of a refined amusement. We might add that the subjects of the libretto are generally low in their moral tone, and suited to gratify a depraved taste rather than cherish a correct judgment. In this way the opera, like the modern theatre, will live and flourish wherever civilization brings wealth and leisure, proving no benefit but full of positive injury to the community. Nor could they be purged of their evil elements. Experience has shown that to remove from the theatre and opera their sops to a vicious pruriency is to destroy their existence. The residuum of rational amusement (for that is the highest title we can

bestow) would be too flat for the dainty palate of the theatregoing public; while the construction of a theatre as a place of instruction, and that through a severe artistic expression, would fill the community with loathing. We have thus outlined our view of the causes of the short career of Greek Tragedy. We have defined it as possessed of two characteristics, high instruction and a rigid expression. We have uttered our belief that these characteristics can only exist on the stage among a people of lofty thought, free spirit and conscious power, and that, while poets as great and poetry as sublime may be found in other circumstrnces, yet no form of poetry so breathes a consistent, dignity and so enwraps the Muse in grandeur, as the Tragedy that had its birth, its life, its death at Athens. We believe that its high excellence was the cause of its brief course. Few concomitances of events can receive so exalted a visitor, and none can prolong its stay. We do not, then, in the stereotyped way, attribute the decline of tragedy simply to the decay of Greek liberties, but to the failure of many inviting causes. Had Athens been untouched by Macedon and Rome, we would still have looked for the shattering of so refined a workmanship in the midst of human nature, rude even at its best.

2. We now arrive at our second point of observation. What was the moral and religious tone of the Greek Tragedy? This leads to an analysis of that instruction which we have seen that it conveyed.

The Hellenic race were always marked for their reverence for Deity. Orphic hymns and St. Paul's address on Areopagus, stand as witnesses at the two extreme points of Grecian history before Christ. Greek skepticism was the product of the confusions of Greek cosmological philosophy, and did not appear until Tragedy was beginning to fail. Euripides was tainted with its errors, though not to the extent he has been charged. Skepticism was contrary to the Greek tendencies; hence the powerful influence of the Socratic opposition to its progress, which gave rise to schools that philosophically taught a lofty theistic creed; and a pregnant fact in this connection is, that the cry of Atheism was adopted by the persecutors of Socrates as a successful cover to their violence. Writers on Greek his tory are wont to divide its course into three, a theologic, a

moral, and a philosophic period in regard to the religious instruction of the people. This, perhaps, is a correct division, and while Hesiod may stand as an exponent of the theologic period, we must quote the Tragic poets as instances of moral teaching. Ethical philosophy, as such, was not yet known. Developed systems of philosophic religion were unborn, so that to ascribe the teaching of Stoicism to the tragic writers, is to use a very loose form of words, calculated to convey exceedingly erroneous notions. Some of the elements of the Stoic philosophy, as it was expressed in a later century, were, doubtless, seen in the religious creed of the tragic authors. Destiny as superior to the Divine Aioa, which formed the corner stone of Stoicism, was shadowed forth in the tragedy; yet so dimly as not to weaken the notion of God's sovereignty over man, while in Stoicism it became the foundation of human pride as against the Deity.

The religious teaching of tragedy was one not of detailed articles of belief, but of general reverence to the gods, of humble acknowledgment of, and conformity to, the Divine Will. Euripides, even, who is too rashly accused of skepticism, urges these views upon his audience, as in the Orestes:

τέλος ἔχει δαίμων βροτοῖσι
τέλος ὃπα θέλει.

which might be translated:

"There's a divinity who shapes our ends.”

Ores. 1561.

Again, at the close of the Medea:

πολλῶν ταμίας Ζεὺς ἐν Ὀλύμπῳ,

πολλα δ' άελπτως κραινουσι θεοι·

καὶ τὰ δοκηθέντ' οὐκ ἐτελέσθη,

τῶν δ' αδοκήτων πόρον εὗρε θεός.

"The great dispenser is th' Olympic god,

And unexpected issues are divine;

Hope's painted scenes await in vain his nod,

While at his word unreckon'd ends combine."

This same acknowledgment of a Divine superintending Providence is found in the above formula, with an alteration in the

first line, at the close of the Andromache, the Alcestis, the Bacchæ, and the Helen. Even where the skepticism of this poet enters, it detracts not from the reverential attitude, although it weakens the religious force. A good illustration of this is seen in the Troades:

ὦ γῆς ὄχημα, κ' απὶ γῆς ἔχων ἕδραν,
ὅστις πότ' ει σὺ δυστόπαστος εἰδέναι,
Ζεὺς, εἴτ ̓ ἀνάγκη φύσεος, εἴτε νοῦς βροτῶν,
προσηυξάμην σε πάντα γὰρ δὲ ἀψόφου
βαίνων κελεύθου, κατὰ δίκην τὰ θνήτ' ἄγεις.

Troades, 890.

"O Jove, who rul'st the rolling of the earth,
And o'er it hast thy throne, whoe'er thou art,
The ruling mind, or the necessity

Of nature, I adore thee: dark thy ways

And silent are thy steps; to mortal man

Yet thou with justice all things dost ordain."

The whole legend of the Bacchæ exhibits the punishment of impiety. In short, the most irreligious of the three great tragic authors keeps ever in view "the awful eye of God," (tò oeuvòv Zyròs ŏμμa, Hip. 899.) Quotations from Sophocles are scarcely necessary to illustrate our remarks, yet we subjoin a few:

But none that comes not from the hand of God."

Trach. 1279.

And this lofty poet teaches that all the acts of the Divine Director are performed in impartial truth. Δίκη ξύνεδρος Ζηνός 13 his succinct expression, (Oed. Col. 1382,) and reminds us of the Psalmist's words, "Righteousness and judgment are the habitation of his throne."

It is easy to multiply instances like the above, testifying to the high religious teaching of these princes of tragedy. The morality inculcated among men is of corresponding character, not, of course, to be compared with the dicta of revelation, but reaching the summit of heathen conceptions. Honesty, hospitality, truthfulness, obedience to authority and all the virtues known to a world unenlightened by God's revealed word, are held up to admiration and imitation.

In our Christian countries we worship and receive spiritual instruction at one and the same time and place. In Athens, the Greek went up to his temple to worship and to the theatre for his religious instruction. The theatre was, in reality, a "school of morals;" nay, more, it was a school of piety. The sober, the thoughtful, the experienced, the wise, the patriotic and the godly were the supporters of the Attic Tragedy, and a dignity environed its precincts that was only excelled by the majesty of the divine altars. Comedy was a compromise with man's depravity, and helped to destroy this purest and noblest monument of Athenian culture and wisdom.

In comparison with this high position of the Dionysan stage, what a sad spectacle does the acted drama of modern times present! Talent may exist, but all that gave lustre to the talent of the ancients is gone. Why is this? Is the theory correct, that Christianity is unfavorable to exalted poetry, and that Tragedy can never grow in a Christian soil? Or are the reasons before given sufficient to account for the low estate of the modern drama? The principal specification in the charge that Christianity is unfavorable to Tragedy, and other lofty styles of poetry, has been that God is so sublime in the Christian's thought that we may not reach Him in the play of the imagination, while heathen gods, being only deified men, could be brought into action as men of loftier mien, and woods and streams could be peopled with their prolific numbers. This is plausible, but much can be adduced on the other side.