Sophocles alone that was an artist in that time; he was but one of the
many who, in every department, sought, in study and in science, the
secrets of the wise or the beautiful. Pericles and Phidias were in
their several paths of fame what Sophocles was in his. But it was not
the art of an emasculate or effeminate period--it grew out of the
example of a previous generation of men astonishingly great. It was
art still fresh from the wells of nature. Art with a vast field yet
unexplored, and in all its youthful vigour and maiden enthusiasm.
There was, it is true, at a period a little later than that in which
the genius of Sophocles was formed, one class of students among whom a
false taste and a spurious refinement were already visible--the class
of rhetoricians and philosophical speculators. For, in fact, the art
which belongs to the imagination is often purest in an early age; but
that which appertains to the reason and intellect is slow before it
attains mature strength and manly judgment, Among these students was
early trained and tutored the thoughtful mind of Euripides; and hence
that art which in Sophocles was learned in more miscellaneous and
active circles, and moulded by a more powerful imagination, in
Euripides often sickens us with the tricks of a pleader, the quibbles
of a schoolman, or the dullness of a moralizing declaimer. But as, in
the peculiar attributes and character of his writings, Euripides
somewhat forestalled his age--as his example had a very important
influence upon his successors--as he did not exhibit till the fame of
Sophocles was already confirmed--and as his name is intimately
associated with the later age of Aristophanes and Socrates--it may be
more convenient to confine our critical examination at present to the
tragedies of Sophocles.

Although the three plays of the "Oedipus Tyrannus," the "Oedipus at
Coloneus," and the "Antigone," were composed and exhibited at very