two languages,- certain it is, that the Latin iambics of Seneca, &c. (in the tragedies ascribed to him), cannot be so read by an English mouth as to produce anything like the sonorous rhythmus and the grand intonation of the Greek iambics. This is a curious fact, and as yet, we believe, unnoticed. But over and above this original adaptation of the Greek language to the iambic metre, we have no doubt whatever that the recitation of verse on the stage was of an artificial and semi-musical character. It was undoubtedly much more sustained and intonated with a slow and measured stateliness, which, whilst harmonizing it with the other circumstances of solemnity in Greek tragedy, would bring it nearer to music. Beyond a doubt, it had the effect (and might have the effect even now, managed by a good reader) of the recitative in the Italian opera; as, indeed, in other points, the Italian opera is a much nearer representative of the Greek tragedy, than the direct modern tragedy, professing that title.

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X. As to the Chorus, nothing needs to be said upon this element of the Athenian tragedy. Everybody knows how solemn, and therefore how solemnizing, must have been the richest and most lyrical music, the most passionate of the ancient poetry, the most dithyrambic of tragic and religious raptures, supported to the eye by the most hieroglyphic and therefore mysterious of dances. For the dances of the chorus, the strophe and the antistrophe, were symbolic, and therefore full of mysterious meanings; and not the less impressive, because these meanings and these symbols had lost their significancy to the mob; since the very cause of that loss lay in the

antiquity of their origin. One great error which remains to be removed is the notion that the chorus either did support, or was meant to support, the office of a moral teacher. The chorus simply stood on the level of a sympathizing spectator, detached from the business and interests of the action; and its office was to guide or to interpret the sympathies of the audience. Here was a great error of Milton's, which will be found in two separate places. At present it is sufficient to say, that the mysterious solemnity conferred by the chorus presupposes and is in perfect harmony with our theory of a life within a life,— a life sequestrated into some far-off slumbering state, having the severe tranquillity of Hades,— a life symbolized by the marble life of sculpture; but utterly out of all symmetry and proportion to the realities of that human life which we moderns take up as the basis of our tragic drama.

THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES,

AS REPRESENTED ON THE EDINBURGH STAGE.

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EVERY thing in our days is new. Roads, for instance, which, being formerly of the earth earthy,' and therefore perishable, are now iron, and next door to being immortal; tragedies, which are so entirely new, that neither we nor our fathers, through eighteen hundred and ninety odd years, gone by, since Cæsar did our little island the honor to sit upon its skirts, have ever seen the like to this Antigone;' and, finally, even more new are readers, who, being once an obedient race of men, most humble and deferential in the presence of a Greek scholar, are now become intractably mutinous; keep their hats on whilst he is addressing them; and listen to him or not, as he seems to talk sense or nonsense. Some there are, however, who look upon all these new things as being intensely old. Yet, surely the railroads are new? No; not at all. Talus, the iron man in Spenser, who continually ran round the island of Crete, administering gentle warning and correction to offenders, by flooring them with an iron flail, was a very ancient personage in Greek fable; and the received opinion is, that he must have been a Cretan railroad, called The Great Circular Coast-Line, that carried my lords the judges on their circuits of jail-delivery. The Antigone,' again, that

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wears the freshness of morning dew, and is so fresh and dewy in the beautiful person of Miss Faucit, had really begun to look faded on the Athenian stage, and even' of a certain age,' about the death of Pericles, whose meridian year was the year 444 before Christ. Lastly, these modern readers, that are so obstinately rebellious to the once Papal authority of Greek, they — No; on consideration, they are new. Antiquity produced many monsters, but none like them.

The truth is, that this vast multiplication of readers, within the last twenty-five years, has changed the prevailing character of readers. The minority has become the overwhelming majority: the quantity has disturbed the quality. Formerly, out of every five readers, at least four were, in some degree, classical scholars or, if that would be saying too much, if two of the four had small Latin and less Greek,' they were generally connected with those who had more, or at the worst, who had much reverence for Latin, and more reverence for Greek. If they did not all share in the services of the temple, all, at least, shared in the superstition. But, now-a-days, the readers come chiefly from a class of busy people who care very little for ancestral crazes. Latin they have heard of, and some of them know it as a good sort of industrious language, that even, in modern times, has turned out many useful books, astronomical, medical, philosophical, and (as Mrs. Malaprop observes) diabolical; but, as to Greek, they think of it as of an ancient mummy: you spend an infinity of time in unswathing it from its old dusty wrappers, and, when you have come to the end, what do you find for your pains? A woman's face, or a baby's, that certainly is not the better for