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This Day was Published,

Handsomely printed, in 3 Vols. Post 8vo, Price
L.1, 11s. 6d. boards,
KENILWORTH;

A Romance,

BY THE AUTHOR OF" WAVERLEY," "IVANHOE," &c.

"No scandal about Queen Elizabeth, I hope!"

THE CRITIC.

EDINBURGH: Printed for ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE and Co. and JOHN BALLANTYNE, Edinburgh; and HURST, ROBINSON, & Co. London.

Of whom may be had,

IVANHOE, a Romance. 3 Vols. Post 8vo. L.1, 10s. Also New Editions of the Author's other Works.

31ons might with equal propriety e ascribed to persons of the other sex,-or, at any rate, thrown into a joint and common stock for almost indifferent use amongst themselves. There is hardly a shade of variation to break the sameness of this uniformity, or to distinguish the heroines from each other. The sacrificed daughter of one play, is the devoted wife of a second, and the pious sister of a third. Difference of circumstances makes little difference of language or of feeling. Polyxene

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BY ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO., Edinburgh,
AND HURST, ROBINSON, & CO., LONDON.

This Day was Published,

Price 6d.

ABSTRACT

OF

MR BROUGHAM'S

EDUCATION BILLS.

LONDON: Printed for Messrs LONGMAN & Co. Paternoster-Row, and JAMES RIDGWAY, Piccadilly.

In Arts and Sciences.-Equations-Fluids (Elevation of, in Capillary Tubes)-Food (Selection, Preservation, and Preparation of) Galvanism-Gas Lights-Horticulture.

In Politics and Political Economy.Funding System-Go

vernment.

*This Work will be completed in Six Volumes. Volume V. Part I. containing the Second Part of MR STEWART'S Dissertation, is in great forwardness, and will be published early in 1821.

EDINBURGH REVIEW,

NOVEMBER, 1820.

N°. LXVIII.

ART. I. The Comedies of Aristophanes. By T. MITCHELL, A. M. late Fellow of Sidney-Sussex College, Cambridge. Vol. I. London. John Murray, Albemarle-street, 1820. pp. 454.

NOTWITHSTANDING the great success of the Greek writers

in tragic composition, there were circumstances affecting the state of ancient Greece, very adverse to their efforts in that department of poetry. There was a clumsy, cumbrous, intricate Mythology,--within the mazes of which, when once involved, the poet could do little but fatigue himself, and weary his audience. There was a Religion, addressed so much to the senses, and so little to the heart or understanding, that at best it was but a gorgeous plaything to amuse, or a bugbear to terrify full-grown nurseries, and denied him all powerful topics of consolation or of terror. There was a restriction upon Female intercourse, a confinement of the high-born dames of antiquity to little better than menial offices,-that obstructed or obscured all the more delicate workings of the female breast, and thus deprived him of one great charm of the modern drama. Women, it is true, are sometimes made the leading characters in Grecian tragedies; but they want the discriminating stamp of womanhood; and, for the most part, their feelings and expressions might with equal propriety be ascribed to persons of the other sex,-or, at any rate, thrown into a joint and common stock for almost indifferent use amongst themselves. There is hardly a shade of variation to break the sameness of this uniformity, or to distinguish the heroines from each other. The sacrificed daughter of one play, is the devoted wife of a second, and the pious sister of a third. Difference of circumstances makes little difference of language or of feeling. Polyxene

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*

might sit for the picture of Iphigenia, or Alcestis stand as the reflection of Antigone. Love, so fruitful a source of interest with modern writers, is left uncultivated by the ancient dramatists. They have no Juliets, no Belvideras, no Ophelias. They till a sterner soil, and are more successful in the delineation of jealousy or revenge. Medea is indeed the picture of a consummate artist-true to nature, and essentially female. She is in revenge what Lady Macbeth is in ambition, as bold, as resolute, as bloody,-yet with one touch of tenderness to redeem her from abhorrence. The last smile of her children-the παντατον γελασμα is to her what the resemblance in the sleeping Duncan to her father is to the other. But with this exception, the remark holds good. The poet could not perceive the defect, and of consequence could not remedy it. To supply the want of a poetical theology, he had two resources, of which unsparing use is made:he could resort to the Furies or the Fates. The first, in the hands of Æschylus, were enough to frighten women into miscarriages, and children into fits; and even modern breasts may thrill at the invocations of Edipus, or the agonies of || Orestes. The mysterious power of Destiny is made yet more potent and appalling. Leading its unconscious, helpless victim, through the dreary vicissitudes of madness, crime, and misery, to a catastrophe of undeserved but unavoidable horror, it makes the gradual development of the Edipus Tyrannus the most heart-rending series of action that imagination can conceive. We drink the cup of agony by drops, and find it regularly increase in bitterness to the close. This masterpiece of Grecian tragedy stands single. It is as if the Muse had concentrated her whole strength to make one im

*Sophocles and Eschylus have pourtrayed, one the jealous anxieties of a Dejanira, and the other the jealous revenge of a Clytemnestra; but they have nothing like love in any of their plays. Euripides introduced something like it, but it was in his hands a Kavvos pws, (Aristot. Rhetor. II. c. 6.)—the passion, not the sentiment; not, in short, the kind of love which we evidently mean to signify in the text. See the Frogs of Aristophanes, v. 1044, and the Clouds, v. 1372.

+ Aristophanes does not forget this circumstance. See the Plutus, v. 423, and the Scholiast upon it.

Edipus Coloneus, v. 84.

There is nothing in poetry more truly overwhelming than the picture of the sufferings of Orestes under the persecution of these tremendous beings, as it is given in the Iphigenia in Tauris of Euri. `pides.

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mortal effort. But in general her productions fall very short of perfection. There are the marks of what might have been done. It is the outline, not filled up-the elements, but not in combination-the low, imperfect murmurs of Dodona, before her oaks were masters of their inspired articulation.

The Comic poet, on the contrary, had not to combat with any such obstacles as we have described; or rather, the very circumstances most inimical to the Tragic writer, were propitious to him. If he could not catch the finer lineaments of female character, which the nature of society in ancient times prevented from being fully developed-if, like Tilburina in the Critic, he could not see what was not yet in sight,—still there were certain gross, discriminating features, too marked and striking in the females of every age to be mistaken, that he could easily delineate for the amusement of his audience. The heterogeneous attributes, perplexed relationships, and still more ambiguous characters of the Heathen deities, that clogged and dulled the spirit of the tragic chorusses, supplied him with an exhaustless source of ridicule and merriment. A cowardly Bacchus, disguised, beaten, and derided; † a greedy, gormandizing Hercules, baffled in his projected gluttony; ‡ or a diplomatic Neptune, and a gibbering Triballus; were treats too exquisite to be withheld. The same profaneness, which in a grave tragedian or philosopher-an § Eschylus or a Socrateswas visited with forfeiture or death, the fine or the hemlock,from Aristophanes or Eupolis, was welcomed with thunders of applause. Even from the Eleusinian mysteries of Ceres,-the most solemn rites of the Grecian religion, the violation of which is esteemed by Horace as sufficient to excommunicate from all civil relations, even from these the audacious hand of the Comic poet tore the veil, and gave more than a glimpse to the uninitiated. The gods, the priests, the ceremonies,-the whole paraphernalia of Paganism,-were for him but a magazine on which to draw for blasphemous jests and impious buffooneries.

*Witness the Lysistrate, the Ecclesiazusa, the Thesmophoriazusæ. See the humours of Bacchus and Xanthias in the Frogs. See again the Frogs, and the last act of the Birds.

See the last act of the Aves, a play in which, throughout, the most cutting sarcasms upon the Athenians are blended with the most daring mockery of the Gods.

§ Eschylus was condemned to death for some expressions of impious tendency in one of his plays. His brother Amynias saved him, by uncovering an arm, of which the hand had been cut off at Salamis. Of Socrates we shall presently have to speak.

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