the very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: it
is a monster for which the corruption of society for ever brings
forth new food, which it devours in secret.

The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes
of expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any
other, the connexion of poetry and social good is more observable
in the drama than in whatever other form. And it is indisputable
that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded
with the highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the
extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished,
is a mark of a corruption of manners and an extinction of the
energies which sustain the soul of social life. But, as Machiavelli
says of political institutions, that life may be preserved and
renewed, if men should arise capable of bringing back the drama
to its principles. And this is true with respect to poetry in its
most extended sense: all language, institution and form, require not
only to be produced but to be sustained: the office and character
of a poet participates in the divine nature as regards providence,
no less than as regards creation.

Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance first of
the Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms, were so many symbols
of the extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in Greece.
The bucolic writers, who found patronage under the lettered tyrants
of Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representatives of its most
glorious reign. Their poetry is intensely melodious, like the odour
of the tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess
of sweetness; whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as a
meadow-gale of June, which mingles the fragrance all the flowers