with good and evil in conduct or habit. The corruption which has
been imputed to the drama as an effect, begins when the poetry
employed in its constitution ends: I appeal to the history of manners
whether the periods of the growth of the one and the decline of the
other have not corresponded with an exactness equal to any example
of moral cause and effect.

The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached
to its perfection, ever co-existed with the moral and intellectual
greatness of the age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are
as mirrors in which the spectator beholds himself, under a thin
disguise of circumstance, stript of all but that ideal perfection
and energy which every one feels to be the internal type of all that
he loves, admires, and would become. The imagination is enlarged
by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they distend
in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived;
the good affections are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror,
and sorrow; and an exalted calm is prolonged from the satiety of
this high exercise of them into the tumult of familiar life: even
crime is disarmed of half its horror and all its contagion by being
represented as the fatal consequence of the unfathomable agencies
of nature; error is thus divested of its wilfulness; men can no
longer cherish it as the creation of their choice. In a drama of
the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it
teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect. Neither the eye
nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it
resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, is
as a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest
rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from the
simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with majesty