owed to obscure the
distinct hearing of the words. On the contrary, the evident purpose was to
render the words more audible, and to secure by the elevations and pauses
greater facility of understanding the poetry. For the choral songs are,
and ever must have been, the most difficult part of the tragedy; there
occur in them the most involved verbal compounds, the newest expressions,
the boldest images, the most recondite allusions. Is it credible that the
poets would, one and all, have been thus prodigal of the stores of art and
genius, if they had known that in the representation the whole must have
been lost to the audience,--at a time too, when the means of after
publication were so difficult and expensive, and the copies of their works
so slowly and narrowly circulated?

The masks also must be considered--their vast variety and admirable
workmanship. Of this we retain proof by the marble masks which represented
them; but to this in the real mask we must add the thinness of the
substance and the exquisite fitting on to the head of the actor; so that
not only were the very eyes painted with a single opening left for the
pupil of the actor's eye, but in some instances, even the iris itself was
painted, when the colour was a known characteristic of the divine or
heroic personage represented.

Finally, I will note down those fundamental characteristics which
contradistinguish the ancient literature from the modern generally, but
which more especially appear in prominence in the tragic drama. The
ancient was allied to statuary, the modern refers to painting. In the
first there is a predominance of rhythm and melody, in the second of
harmony and counterpoint. The Greeks idolized the finite, and therefore
were the masters of all grace, elegance, proportion, fancy, dignity,
majesty--of whatever, in short, is capable of being definitely conveyed by
defined forms or thoughts: the moderns revere the infinite, and affect the
indefinite as a vehicle of the infinite;--hence their passions, their
obscure hopes and fears, their wandering through the unknown, their
grander moral feelings, their more august conception of man as man, their
future rather than their past--in a word, their sublimity.

Progress Of The Drama.

Let two persons join in the same scheme to ridicule a third, and either
take advantage of, or invent, some story for that purpose, and mimicry
will have already produced a sort of rude comedy. It becomes an