pides;
but it is always the clear-eyed Sophocles whom Aristotle accepted as the
master of all who strive for distinction in the theater. And
Aristophanes, with all his exuberance of humor and all his lyric
elevation, is, after all, too local and too temporary to be ranked with
the broad-minded Moliere. So also Calderon, whom the polemic Schlegel
wisht to promote to an equality with the very greatest of dramatic
poets, is too careless of form and too medieval in spirit. Promotion
must also be denied, for one reason or another, to Ben Jonson, to
Corneille and Racine, to Schiller, to Alfieri, and to Victor Hugo.
However ardently their claims may be urged by their compatriots, the
international tribunal would refuse to admit any one of them to an
equality with Sophocles, Shakspere, and Moliere, the greatest of the
Greeks, the greatest of the English, the greatest of the French, the
three races that have excelled in the arts of the theater.

Even tho no German can sustain a claim to supremacy in the drama, it is
to the Germans that the consent of the whole world now awards the
incontestable supremacy in the sister art of music. To the race that
gave birth to Bach and Beethoven, to Mozart and Schubert and Wagner, it
matters little whether the chiefs of music number two only, or whether
they may be so many as four or five. Indeed, it may be admitted at once
that the list would need to be widely extended before it would include
the name of any composer who was not a scion of the Teutonic stock.

There is a certain significance, also, in the probability that the
outsider who could best justify a claim for inclusion would be a Russian
rather than an Italian or a Frenchman. And this estimate, it may be well
to confess, is not personal to the present writer, who has no skill in
music and scant acquaintance with its intricacies; it is the outcome of
a disinterested endeavor to discover the consensus of expert opinion,
free from any racial bias.

But the northern races who excel in the art of the musician seem to be
inferior to the southern in the arts of the painter and of the
sculptor,--more particularly in the latter. The supreme sculptors are
apparently two or three: Phidias and Michelangelo, beyond all question,
and with them probably we ought also to place Donatello. Of Praxiteles
we know too little. Of most other artists in marble and in bronze we
know too much, however fine their occasional achievements,--Verrocchio's
'Col