generally commonplace ?)-counsels self-restraint to Prometheus. Prometheus is only goaded to fiercer scorn thereby. He bursts out as follows:

Reverence thou,

Adore thou, flatter thou, whomever reigns,
Whenever reigning! but for me, your Zeus
Is less than nothing. Let him act and reign
His brief hour out according to his will—
He will not, therefore, rule the gods too long.
But, lo! I see that courier-god of Zeus,

That new-made menial of the new-crowned king.

He doubtless comes to announce to us something new.

Hermes, messenger of Zeus, comes requiring, from the king of gods and men, that Prometheus speak plainly out his boasted secret. Prometheus answers proudly, and concludes:

Do I seem

To tremble and quail before your modern gods?

Far be it from me! For thyself, depart,

Re-tread thy steps in haste. To all thou hast asked,

I answer nothing.

Altercation ensues between Hermes and Prometheus, Prometheus speaking with a rebellious loftiness and pride worthy of Milton's Satan. Here, indeed, is as much true parallel for the first books of the Paradise Lost as any thing in literature could furnish. We add a further specimen,

Prometheus says to Hermes:

No torture from his hand

Nor any machination in the world

Shall force mine utterance, ere he loose, himself,
These cankerous fetters from me! For the rest,
Let him now hurl his blanching lightnings down,
And with his white-winged snows and mutterings deep
Of subterranean thunders, mix all things,

Confound them in disorder. None of this

Shall bend my sturdy will, and make me speak

The name of his dethroner who shall come.

Hermes is exasperatingly calm and advisory. But he

threatens withal:

Absolute will disjoined

From perfect mind is worse than weak. Behold,
Unless my words persuade thee, what a blast

And whirlwind of inevitable woe

Must sweep persuasion through thee. For at first
The Father will split up this jut of rock

With the great thunder and the bolted flame,

And hide thy body where a hinge of stone

Shall catch it like an arm ;—and when thou hast passed

A long black time within, thou shalt come out
To front the sun while Zeus's wingéd hound,
The strong carnivorous eagle, shall wheel down
To meet thee, self-called to a daily feast,
And set his fierce beak in thee, and tear off
The long rags of thy flesh, and batten deep
Upon thy dusky liver. Do not look

For any end moreover to this curse,

Or ere some god appear, to accept thy pangs
On his own head vicarious, and descend

With unreluctant step the darks of hell

And gloomy abysses around Tartarus.

The chorus chimes in with Hermes in the customary strain of choric worldly-wisdom :

Our Hermes suits his reasons to the times;
At least I think so-since he bids thee drop
Self-will for prudent counsel. Yield to him!

When the wise err, their wisdom makes their shame.

Prometheus abides stout and defiant :

Let the locks of the lightning, all bristling and whitening,
Flash, coiling me round,

While the æther goes surging 'neath thunder and scourging
Of wild winds unbound!

Let the blast of the firmament whirl from its place
The earth rooted below,

And the brine of the ocean, in rapid emotion,
Be it driven in the face

Of the stars up in heaven, as they walk to and fro !
Let him hurl me anon, into Tartarus-on-

To the blackest degree,

With Necessity's vortices strangling me down ;

But he cannot join death to a fate meant for me!

Hermes advises the sea-nymphs to withdraw and leave the maniac to his fate, lest they, too, be involved in his impending ruin. And now one is reminded of the title.to a chapter in The Mill on the Floss: "Showing that Old Acquaintances are Capable of Surprising Us." For the chorus most unexpectedly replies with spirit, nay, with magnificent heroism, to the counsel of Hermes. The sea-nymphs decide to share, with the high-hearted sufferer, his dark and dreadful fate : Chorus. Change thy speech for another, thy thought for a new,

If to move me and teach me indeed be thy care!
For thy words swerve so far from the loyal and true,
That the thunder of Zeus seems more easy to bear.
How! couldst teach me to venture such vileness? behold!

I choose, with this victim, this anguish foretold!

I recoil from the traitor in hate and disdain

And I know that the curse of the treason is worse

Than the pang of the chain.

The tragedy ends with the following sublime salutation and welcome, from Prometheus, of his doom.

Ay! in act, now-in word, now, no more,

Earth is rocking in space!

And the thunders crash up with a roar upon roar,

And the eddying lightnings flash fire in my face,

And the whirlwinds are whirling the dust round and round,

And the blasts of the winds universal leap free

And blow each upon each with a passion of sound,
And æther goes mingling in storm with the sea !

Such a curse on my head, in a manifest dread,

From the hand of your Zeus has been hurtled along.
O, my mother's fair glory! O, Æther, enringing,
All eyes with the sweet common light of thy bringing,
Dost see how I suffer this wrong?

The sentiment naturally inspired in the sympathetic breast by the spectacle of enduring and defying Prometheus is very well expressed by the Ettrick Shepherd in that strange compound of the noble and the base, the Noctes Ambrosianæ of Christopher North. The quaint Scottish dialect adds a pleasant piquancy to the expression: "Ane amaist fears to pity him, lest we wrang fortitude sae majestical."

In conclusion, it may be said generally of Æschylus, that his chief fault was, as the French would express it, the fault of his chief virtue. Grandeur, sublimity, was the great characteristic of his genius. But he was sometimes grandiose when he meant to be grand, sometimes simply swelling when he meant to be sublime. Here was the point in him found open to caricature, when Lucian in his Prometheus (or Caucasus) travestied the great master, in his characteristic, irreverent, but irresistibly amusing style. That Lucian could not make Æschylus wholly ridiculous is proof enough that Æschylus had an indestructible element in him of genuineness.

VIII.
SOPHOCLES.

THE proud and perhaps scornful spirit of Æschylus had to brook the mortification of being supplanted in fashion and favor by a younger rival. Sophocles came up, a smiling youth, and, with what to us half seems an easy and unconscious grace, took off for himself the crown of supremacy in tragic verse that had been wont to sit on the brow of Æschylus. Sophocles lived long to enjoy his triumphs, frequently but not quite uninterruptedly repeated throughout a productive career almost as remarkably protracted as was that of the painter Titian-two pictures by whom are displayed in Venice side by side, one done in the twentieth, and the other

in the ninetieth, year of the artist's age. Sophocles, an old man, was accused of doting, by litigants who through this charge would invalidate before the law some transaction of his prejudicial to their interest. The poet triumphantly confuted his accusers by reciting a new choric ode of his (presently to be shown our readers) in praise of the beauties of Colonus. The authenticated incidents of his life are not many, and the few are not important. He was richly and variously gifted-with personal charm, with happy temperament, with popular favor, with good fortune of almost every sort, as, beyond all these things, with an exquisite taste and a beautiful genius. "He has died well, having suffered no evil," was a poet's sentence on Sophocles, pronounced not long after his decease. Aristophanes, who could not be bitter enough toward Euripides, represents Sophocles abiding in the under world, aloof from strife, "gentle there, even as he was gentle here." It would seem, however, that the virtue of Sophocles was a Greek virtue, that is-alas, to be obliged to say it !a virtue not intolerant of unchaste life.

Fortunately for the fame of this great poet, he survives in seven of his masterpieces. Among these, however-masterpieces all—it is, on the whole, not difficult to make our present choice. We must make our readers acquainted with the Ed'i-pus Ty-ran'nus, or dipus the King. This tragedy is considered, by perhaps the majority of qualified critics, to be not only the best work of Sophocles, but the "bright consummate flower" of all Greek tragedy.

We begin with the argument prefixed to the play by Prof. Lewis Campbell, whose translation we shall chiefly use:

"La'i-us, the descendant of Cadmus, and king of Thebes (or Thebè), had been told by an oracle that, if a son were born to him by his wife Jocasta, the boy would be his father's death.

"Under such auspices Edipus was born, and to elude the prophecy was exposed by his parents on Mount Cith-æ'-ron.