not regard either as the principal
object, or even a material part, of dramatic composition. To delineate
the play of the passions was their great object: Aristotle says
expressly that was the end of tragedy. To that object they devoted all
their powers; they succeeded in laying bare the human heart in its most
agonized moments, and in its inmost recesses, with terrible fidelity. In
this way, they frequently represented it as torn by a double distress,
each prompting to atrocious actions; as in the _Medea_ of Euripides,
where the unhappy wife of Jason distracted by jealousy at the desertion
and second marriage of her husband, destroys her own children in the
fury of her vengeance against him; or the _Hecuba_ of the same author,
where the discrowned and captive widow of Priam, doomed in one day to
see her daughter sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles, and the dead body
of her son washed ashore by the waves, takes a terrible vengeance on his
murderer, by putting his children to death, and turning him, after his
eyes have been put out, to beg his way through the world. The Greeks
seem to have been deeply impressed with the evils, vicissitudes, and
sufferings of life. No word occurs so frequently in their dramas as
_evils_, ([Greek: kaka].) In witnessing the delineation of its miseries
on the stage, they seem to have held somewhat of the same stern pleasure
which the North American Indians have in beholding the prolonged torture
inflicted on a condemned captive at the stake. Every one felt a thrill
of interest at beholding how another could bear a series of reverses and
sufferings, which might any day be his own.

Notwithstanding all our admiration for the Greek tragedies, and firmly
believing that they are framed on the true principle of dramatic
composition--the neglect of which has occasioned its long-continued
decline in this country--we are yet far from thinking them perfect. The
age of the world, the peculiarities of ancient manners, rendered it
impossible it should be so. We could conceive dramas more perfect and
varied than any even of the masterpieces of Sophocles or Euripides. We
are persuaded the world will yet see them outdone; though they will be
outdone only by those who follow out their principles. But there are
three particulars, in which, in modern times, themes of surpassing
interest and importance are opened to the dramatic poet, which were of
necessity unknown to the writers of antiquity; and it is by blend