What, can you sleep? Is this a time t' indulge Hear me, oh hear; 'tis for my soul's repose I plead rouse your keen sense, infernal powers! 'Tis Clytemnestra calls you in your dreams.-POTTER. The furies scream out in their sleep, the spectre again urges them to rouse Arise.. -And is this all? Awake, -With fiery breath That snuffs the scent of blood, pursue this son, Follow him, blast him! POTTER. What art! what aggravation in this horrid prelude! what preparations for effect! with what a burst must they have sprung from their dream !— Well may we give credit to the account of the terrors which they impressed upon the spectators: their numbers, their attire, their temples wreathed with snakes, and their hands armed with flames, the clangor of the orchestra, the violence of their motions, their yelling screams, seem to empty the whole infernal regions on the stage. We must take into our recollection also, that this spectacle was exhibited to a people, who considered these beings as deities, at whose shrines they paid divine worship, and to whose eyes and imaginations this snaky attire was wholly new; for it was the bold fancy of the poet, which first dressed them in this manner, and they have kept the fashion from that moment to the present. I cannot dismiss this tragedy without observing that there is a shift of the scene from Delphi to Athens, which I take to be a single instance of the sort on the Greek stage. The number of the chorus being limited by public edict after the exhibition of this tragedy, it is clear that the tragedy of the Supplicants must have been subsequent to it, inasmuch as the chorus of Danaides consisted of fifty persons; and as the whole tenor of this soft and pathetic drama bears an air of atonement to the superstition of the vulgar, and is full of pious submission to the will of Jupiter, and religious veneration for the gods, it seems to me very probable that the poet had a view in this tragedy of the Supplicants, of reconciling the people after the offence he had given them on a former occasion by making too free with the deities, and for which he narrowly escaped their resentment. As to the tragedy of the Seven Chiefs against Thebes, it is said to have been the favourite of its author, and we know it has the testimony of the critic Longinus. The scenery is beautiful; the dialogue characteristic and of a martial glow; the armorial bearings charged on the shields of the armed chiefs are most fancifully devised: and the tender contrast of the persons of the chorus, composed of the daughters of Cadmus, associate every pleasing and animating contemplation that can meet within the compass of one simple drama. I believe there is no ancient poet, that bears so close a resemblance in point of genius to any of the moderns, as Eschylus bears to Shakspeare: the comparison might afford a pleasing subject to a man of learning and leisure; if I was farther to compare the relation, in which Eschylus stands to Sophocles and Euripides, with that of Shakspeare to any of our later dramatists, I should be inclined to put Sophocles in the line with Rowe, and Euripides with Lillo. NUMBER CXXXV. I SHALL now proceed to lay before the public such an account as I have been enabled to collect of the several Greek writers of comedy. The learned reader needs not to be informed how little is to be found in Aristotle's Poetics on the subject of comedy; that treatise by no means answers to the general profession of its title; if it had come down to us as perfect and entire, as it probably was when the author put his last hand to it, and presented a correct copy of his work to Alexander, we might conclude otherwise of it: but to speak of it as it is, we can call it nothing more than a dissertation upon tragedy, in which many things are evidently out of place and order, some no doubt lost, and others mutilated: it is thus considered by the learned commentator Daniel Heinsius, who in his supplementary treatise annexed to his edition, professedly speaks only of the construction of tragedy, and endeavours with great diligence and perspicuity to methodize the whole work, and dispose his author's system into some order and regularity. With the exception of a few obvious remarks upon the epic, as tending to illustrate the drama, and two or three passages where comedy is spoken of only as contrasted with tragedy, the whole of this celebrated dissertation is nothing more than a set of rules for the drama, which are mere transcripts from the compositions of the great writers of the Homeric tragedy, Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides: he analyzes and defines a poem, then actually carried to its perfection: but gives no new lights, no leading instructions, for the furtherance and improvement of what had not arrived to the like state of maturity. With the remains of the three tragic poets above mentioned in our hands, I profess I do not see how we are edified by Aristotle's dissertation, which offers nothing but what occurs upon the reading of their dramas; unless posterity had seen fit to abide by the same laws which they observed, and the modern tragedy had been made exactly to conform to the Greek model. Aristotle, as we have before remarked, speaks of no comedy antecedent to the comedy of Epicharmus: there is reason to think that this author did not fall in with the personal comedy, in the licentious manner it prevailed upon the Athenian stage, even to the time of Aristotle, for it was not reformed there, till the personal satirists were awed into better respect by the Macedonian princes, who succeeded to Alexander; whereas Epicharmus wrote for the court of an absolute prince. Now it is remarkable, that Aristotle makes no strictures upon the licentiousness of the Athenian comedy, nor offers any rules for the correction of the stage, though the schools proscribed it, and the tribunals were at open hostility with it. It is plain he states things as they were, not as they ought to have been; for he pronounces of comedy that it is a picture of human nature, worse and more deformed than the original.' I cannot hold this to be a just character of comedy, as it stood at the time when Aristotle pronounced it: the only entire comedies we have to refer to, are a contradiction to the assertion; for no one will contend that the corrupt and abominable manners of the times in which Aristophanes wrote, did not fully warrant the severity of his satire, or that his characters of depravity are in general over charged, and his pictures of human nature more deformed than their originals.' As for the rest of the comic fraternity, their fragments only can plead for them; but they are fragments of such a nature, as prove them to have been moralists of the sublimest sort, and they have been collected, translated, and applauded, by the gravest and most sententious of the Christian writers for many ages. I will venture to say, that in these scattered relics of the comic stage, more useful knowledge and good sense, better maxims for right conduct in life, and a more generous display of benevolence, justice, public spirit, and all the moral virtues of natural religion, are to be found, than in all the writings of the philosophers, which are so much more entire. Socrates, it is true, could hardly be prevailed upon to enter the comic theatre, but I infer very little against the poets on that account: Plato, I am aware, though an intimate of Aristophanes, banished the drama out of his visionary republic: but what is that more than to say, that if all men were virtuous there would be no need of satirists? The comic poets in return lashed the philosophers over the stage, and they had what they merited, the public applause on their side; the schools and academies of sophists furnished an inexhaustible fund for wholesome ridicule; their contradictory first principles, their demons and clouds, and water and fire, with all their idle systems and hypotheses, their fabulous conceits, dreams, and devices to catch the vulgar, and the affected rigour of their manners, whilst in secret they were addicted to the grossest debauchery and impurity, were continual subjects of satire; and if hypocrisy is not the comic poet's lawful game, what is? There is not a play of Aristophanes to be named, in which these sanctified sinners have not their share in the ridicule; and amongst the fragments above |