timated that times and manners lend their form and pressure to
genius, let me once more draw a slight parallel between the ancient and
modern stage,--the stages of Greece and of England. The Greeks were
polytheists; their religion was local; almost the only object of all their
knowledge, art, and taste, was their gods; and, accordingly, their
productions were, if the expression may be allowed, statuesque, whilst
those of the moderns are picturesque. The Greeks reared a structure,
which, in its parts, and as a whole, filled the mind with the calm and
elevated impression of perfect beauty, and symmetrical proportion. The
moderns also produced a whole--a more striking whole; but it was by
blending materials, and fusing the parts together. And as the Pantheon is
to York Minster or Westminster Abbey, so is Sophocles compared with
Shakespeare; in the one a completeness, a satisfaction, an excellence, on
which the mind rests with complacency; in the other a multitude of
interlaced materials, great and little, magnificent and mean, accompanied,
indeed, with the sense of a falling short of perfection, and yet, at the
same time, so promising of our social and individual progression, that we
would not, if we could, exchange it for that repose of the mind which
dwells on the forms of symmetry in the acquiescent admiration of grace.
This general characteristic of the ancient and modern drama might be
illustrated by a parallel of the ancient and modern music;--the one
consisting of melody arising from a succession only of pleasing
sounds,--the modern embracing harmony also, the result of combination, and
the effect of a whole.

I have said, and I say it again, that great as was the genius of
Shakespeare, his judgment was at least equal to it. Of this any one will
be convinced, who attentively considers those points in which the dramas
of Greece and England differ, from the dissimilitude of circumstances by
which each was modified and influenced. The Greek stage had its origin in
the ceremonies of a sacrifice, such as of the goat to Bacchus, whom we
most erroneously regard as merely the jolly god of wine;--for among the
ancients he was venerable, as the symbol of that power which acts without
our consciousness in the vital energies of nature--the _vinum mundi_--as
Apollo was that of the conscious agency of our intellectual being. The
heroes of old, under the influences of this Bacchic enthusiasm, performed
more than human actions; henc