name (Alas), he may now cry al (alas!) many times. Every one hates him. Shall he go home over the Egean sea? No, he cannot bear to behold the face of his father, Telamon. Shall he rush upon the Trojan fortifications and die fighting! No, thus he might please the Atridæ. He will do something desperate. (In this speech we note another community of conceit between the classic and romantic drama the verbal quibble, the use of the paronomasia, or in plain English, the pun. So in the Agamemnon Helen is called ἕλανδρος, ελέπτολις, a hell of men and cities, as it has been translated.) Tecmessa interposes. Long since deprived of a home and a father, her safety has been bound up in that of her conqueror; she begs him not to expose her and their child unprotected to the insults of enemies. He persists in taking leave of the infant, Eurysaces, whom he commends to the seamen ; at length, however, the entreaties of the captive princess seem to move him; in beautifully flowing verse (would that we could translate it better!) he expresses his change of purpose:

The long immeasurable lapse of time

Brings forth all hidden things, conceals all known.
What may not he expected when we see

The fearful oath, the hardened mind o'ercome.
Yea, I, on direful deed so stern resolved
Am softened down, like iron dipped in oil,
E'en by this woman; pitying her too much
To leave her widowed, with an orphan boy
Among our enemies. Nay, I will go
To bathe me at the meadows by the shore,
That I, from blood-pollutions purified,
May 'scape the goddess's oppressive wrath.
And having found an unfrequented place,
There will I hide my sword, accurséd arm,
Buried in earth where none may see it more;
For since I first received within my grasp
This gift of Hector, foeman bitterest,
The Greeks have never showed me any good.
So true the proverb is that men repeat,
"Foes' gifts are no gifts and they profit not."
And we shall know henceforth to yield to Gods,
And we shall learn henceforth to reverence kings.
They are the rulers, so we must submit.

For things prodigious, yea, and mightiest,
Submit to dignities. The winter snows,
Hard-trodden, yield to fertile summer's heat;
The melancholy night withdraws her steps
Before the blazing coursers of the day.
The breath of storms terrific leaves the deep,
And all-o'erpowering sleep releases those
Whom he has bound nor alway holds them fast,
And how shall we not learn discretion too?

The chorus, overjoyed at the change, invoke the
presence of Pan and Apollo to kallow their raptures: -
I thrill with delight like the shudder of love,
I am borne up with joy to the regions above.
O Pan, Pan, come hither to me!

Wandering over the sea,

From the snow-smitten cliffs of Cyllene advance!
O King that rulest the heavenly quires;

And join in the measure thy wisdom inspires,
The Nysian and Cnosian dance.

For now 'tis my pleasure to sport in that measure,
And come thou too with willing mind

Ever to me propitiously inclined,

O royal Apollo, thy favor make known,
Who holdest the Delian isle for thine own;

O'er the Icarian sea

Hasten to me!

But their joy is destined to have a speedy and bitter termination: Ajax was deceiving them; and while they are thus singing for delight, and a messenger is telling them how all the army have abused Teucer on his brother's account, and how Calchas the soothsayer has expressly commanded that Ajax should be kept in his tent during this day, on which he was especially exposed to the wrath of Pallas, the unhappy man, bent on self-destruction, has found a retired spot for the deed. Here note that there is an indubitable change of scene. The Unity of Place is utterly set at nought. We see Ajax in a wood, preparing to fall on his sword. It cannot fail to do its work the sword of his most hated enemy, Hector, fixed in the hostile earth of Troy. He prays for an

* See our note further on, upon άinhaynte.

easy death, and that Teucer may find his corpse. He invokes the avenging furies upon the whole Grecian army. He bids the sun announce his fate to his aged parents. Of the light of day, of his own country of Salamis, and the country of Troy he takes farewell. These are his latest words. The rest he will tell to those in Hades.

And here by rights, according to our own modern notions, the play should terminate. When Ajax has fallen on his sword the main action is over. But the play does not terminate for several hundred lines it being a peculiarity of the Classic Drama that the action is apt to be redundant, and to be continued beyond the main catastrophe. This redundancy did not begin with the Greek Drama; it is equally conspicuous in the Greek Epic. Both the Iliad and Odyssey go on beyond the winding up of their main interest. The one seems naturally to end with the death of Hector, the other with the revelation of Ulysses and the slaughter of the suitors. The old German epic of the Niebelungen Lied appears to preserve the unity of action better. There is extensive work in prospect for the undertaker, but the poet does not busy himself with anticipating that; when his leading personages are all killed off he leaves them, and pretends to say no more.

I really cannot tell you what after that befel;

The princes all were weeping, the women, too as well; Likewise the noble burghers for friends beloved indeed. Here hath my tale an end; this is the Niebelungen's need. Hence much doubt and confusion; squabbling of commentators, and violent apocope committed on the father of poetry by the sons of criticism, much whereof might have been prevented by observing this peculiarity of the Greek mind. And we will not say that none of the commentators have done so for truly their name is legion; there is nothing which more truly illustrates the ars longa vita brevis than this Homeric controversy in its various forms but we have never met with any who had recourse to this explanation. When we come to the tragedies it might be suggested that their arrangement into trilogies caused the redundancy, for purposes of connexion; but this supposition would not fully account for the fact. If the Agamemnon, Choephora, and Eumenides were rewritten now-a-days, the terminations of the first two,

if not of all, would doubtless be materially curtailed. Take the greatest dramatic poem written in the English language since Shakspeare - Henry Taylor's Philip Van Artevelde the first part ends with the hero's triumph, the second with his death; there is no appendix to either. In the Comedies we may sometimes discover another reason

the peripetia or dramatic irony showing the unsatisfactoriness of the object gained in the plot; thus in the Wasps, when Philocleon is induced to relinquish his pettifogging and electioneering habits, the action of the original plot is complete, but the satirist proceeds to show him behaving worse, and giving more trouble in his character of a fashionable gentleman, than in his old one of a politician. But in the tragedies this superfluity can only be explained by supposing the Greek formula of dramatic action a very different one from that of the moderns. Grote's comparison (in reference to the early myths and legends) of the Greeks to clever children, has often struck us as applicable to many traits of their character and points of their history. This wanting the after-clap to a story, and insisting on having the last possible word about it, is very much in the clever-childish vein. We do not, however, profess to account for the cause of this phenomena; our purpose is only to call the attention of the reader to its existence, and its contrast to the manner in which the unity of action is preserved in its completeness, without the addition of supplementary matter, by the writers of the modern or romantic school. Here the English drama appears to have attained the juste milieu, but the Modern French Romancists have run into the other extreme, and for fear of weakening the catastrophe by subsequent detail, have frequently cut it too short, and left the action incomplete. The effect of these mutilated catastrophes is very startling at first, but they pall on repetition, and the trick of them becomes unpleasantly manifest. For examples of our meaning, we refer to any play of Dumas, and almost any play of Victor Hugo. Thus in the former's tragedy upon the story of Catharine of Cleves (we can never remember the names of Dumas's tragedies, as they never have the slightest connexion with the subject), the death of St. Megrim does not fully complete the action; we have a desire to know the Duchess fate; and in Lord Leveson

Gower's adaptation of this play to the English stage, she poisons herself immediately after her lover's assassination. This is a case in point, as showing the difference between English and French conceptions on the subject.

A familiar illustration of the difference between the Classic and Romantic methods of winding up the action of a play in the catastrophe, is afforded by the drama of Lucrezia Borgia, as originally written for the stage, as adapted to opera, and as usually sung in opera. In Victor Hugo's play, Gennaro, after discovering that himself and companions have been poisoned at the banquet, stabs Lucrezia, who has just life left to announce their relationship before she falls at his feet. In the operatic version, he dies of the poison, and she sings a lament over him in presence of her husband and the chorus. The former termination is in the Romantic, the latter more resembles the Classic method. And it shows which way the sympathies of most moderns are, that, beautiful as the aria era desso il figlio mio is universally acknowledged to be, still it is generally felt to be almost an impertinence, and the opera as represented on the stage is usually, in compliance with public opinion, made to end with the death of Gennaro.

To return then from our digression: Ajax having fallen, the chorus enter to search for him; at first one division appears:

Labor, labor after labor;

Here and there,

Everywere,

No one nowhere can inform me.

Hark, hark!

Sure I hear a heavy tread.

It is the other division of the chorus, engaged in an equally fruitless search. Tecmessa is the first to discover the body and announce the hero's melancholy end. Teucer now appears and joins in the lamentation. They are preparing to inter the corpse when Menelaus forbids them to proceed. Ajax had endeavored to destroy the army, and especially the chiefs; he had proved more hostile than any Trojan; therefore he shall now be deprived of the honors of burial. Cast out on the yellow sand he shall become the banquet of sea-birds. Teucer