which this act consists, must be pronounced with tensions and breakings off, altogether different from those required in a continuous speech, and doubtless made this act last quite as long in the representation, as the others. It appears much shorter to the reader, when seen on paper, than it would to the audience in a theatre.

A cry is the natural expression of bodily pain. Homer's wounded heroes frequently fall with cries to the ground. He makes Venus, when merely scratched, shriek aloud; not that he may thereby paint the effeminacy of the goddess of pleasure, but rather that he may give suffering nature her due; for even the iron Mars, when he feels the lance of Diomede, shricks so horribly, that his cries are like those of ten thousand furious warriors, and fill both armies with horror. Though Homer, in other respects, raises his heroes above human nature, they always remain faithful to it in matters connected with the feeling of pain and insult, or its expression through cries, tears, or reproaches. In their actions they are beings of a higher order, in their feelings true men.

I know that we more refined Europeans, of a wiser and later age, know how to keep our mouths and eyes under closer restraint. We are forbidden by courtesy and propriety to cry and weep; and with us the active bravery of the first rough age of the world has been dIliad, E. 343, 'H dè μéya láxovoa.—

changed into a passive. Yet even our own ancestors, though barbarians, were greater in the latter than in the former. To suppress all pain, to meet the stroke of death with unflinching eye, to die laughing under the bites of adders, to lament neither their own faults, nor the loss of their dearest friends: these were the characteristics of the old heroic courage of the north.f Palnatoko forbade his Jomsburghers

either to fear, or so much as to mention the name of fear.

Not so the Greek.

He felt and feared. He gave

He was ashamed of

utterance to his pain and sorrow. no human weaknesses; only none of them must hold him back from the path of honour, or impede him in the fulfilment of his duty. What in the barbarian sprang from habit and ferocity, arose from principle in the Greek. With him heroism was as the spark concealed in flint, which, so long as no external force awakens it, sleeps in quiet, nor robs the stone either of its clearness or its coldness. With the barbarian it was a bright consuming flame, which was ever roaring, and devoured, or at least blackened, every other good quality. Thus when Homer makes the Trojans march to the combat with wild cries, the Greeks, on the contrary, in resolute silence, the critics justly observe that the poet intended to depict the one as barbarians, the other as a civilized people.

f Th. Bartholinus de causis contemptæ a Danis adhuc gentilibus mortis Cap. I.

g

I wonder that they have not remarked a similar contrast of character in another passage. The hostile armies have made a truce; they are busied with burning their dead; and these rites are accompanied on both sides with the warm flow of tears, (danova θερμὰ χέοντες). But Priam forbids the Trojans to weep, ουδ' έια κλαίειν Πρίαμος μέγας). He forbad them to weep, says Dacier, because he feared the effect would be too softening, and that on the morrow they would go with less courage to the battle. True! But why, I ask, should Priam only fear this result? Why does not Agamemnon also lay the same prohibition on the Greeks? The poet has a deeper meaning; he wishes to teach us that the civilized Greek could be brave at the same time that he wept, while in the uncivilized Trojan all human feelings were to be previously stifled. Νεμέσσωμαί γε μεν ovdev xλázev, is the remark which, elsewhere," Homer puts in the mouth of the intelligent son of Nestor.

It is worth observing that among the few tragedies which have come down to us from antiquity, two are found in which bodily pain constitutes not the lightest part of the misfortune, which befalls the suffering heroes, The Philoctetes and the dying Hercules. Sophocles paints the last also, as moaning, and shrieking, weeping, and crying. Thanks to our polite neighbours, those masters of propriety, no Iliad, H. 421. Odyss. A. 195.

h

such ridiculous and intolerable characters as a moaning Philoctetes or a shrieking Hercules, will ever again appear upon the stage. One of their latest poets1 has indeed ventured upon a Philoctetes, but would he have dared to exhibit the true one?

Even a Laocoon is found among the lost plays of Sophocles. Would that Fate had spared it to us! The slight mention which an old grammarian has made of it affords us no ground for concluding how the poet had handled his subject; but of this I feel certain that Laocoon would not have been drawn more stoically than Philoctetes and Hercules. All stoicism is undramatical; and our sympathy is always proportioned to the suffering expressed by the object which interests us. It is true if we see him bear his misery with a great soul, this grandeur of soul excites our admiration; but admiration is only a cold sentiment, and its inactive astonishment excludes every warmer feeling as well as every distinct idea.

I now come to my inference: if it be true, that a cry at the sensation of bodily pain, particularly according to the old Greek way of thinking, is quite compatible with greatness of soul, it cannot have been for the sake of expressing such greatness that the artist avoided imitating this shriek in marble. Another reason therefore must be found for his here deviating from his rival, the poet, who has expressed it with the happiest results.

i Chataubrun.

CHAPTER II.

BE it fable or history, that Love made the first essay in the plastic arts, it is certain that it never wearied of guiding the hands of the masters of old. Painting, as now carried out in its whole compass, may be defined generally as "the imitation of bodies or matter on a level surface;" but the wise Greek allotted it far narrower limits, and confined it to the imitation of the beautiful only; his artist painted nothing else. Even the commonly beautiful, the beautiful of a lower order, was only his accidental subject, his exercise, his relaxation. It was the perfection of his object that absorbed him in his work; and he was too great to ask his spectators to be satisfied with the mere cold pleasure which arises from a striking resemblance, or the consideration of an artist's ability. In his art nothing was dearer, nothing seemed nobler to him than its proper end.

"Who would paint you when nobody will look at you?" asks an old epigrammatist(1) of an exceedingly deformed man. Many modern artists would say, "However misshapen you are, I will paint you; and although no one could look at you with pleasure, they will look with pleasure at my picture; not because it is your likeness, but because it will be an evidence