individuals worked up into a comic picture of real life, but the whole
frame of society, the constitution, nature, and the gods, were all
fantastically painted in the most ridiculous and laughable colours.

When we have formed in this manner a pure idea of the tragic and comic, as
exhibited to us in Grecian examples, we shall then be enabled to analyze
the various corruptions of both, which the moderns have invented, to
discriminate their incongruous additions, and to separate their several
ingredients.

In the history of poetry and the fine arts among the Greeks, their
development was subject to an invariable law. Everything heterogeneous was
first excluded, and then all homogeneous elements were combined, and each
being perfected in itself, at last elevated into an independent and
harmonious unity. Hence with them each species is confined within its
natural boundaries, and the different styles distinctly marked. In
beginning, therefore, with the history of the Grecian art and poetry, we
are not merely observing the order of time, but also the order of ideas.

In the case of the majority of my hearers, I can hardly presume upon a
direct acquaintance with the Greeks, derived from the study of their
poetical works in the original language. Translations in prose, or even in
verse, in which they are but dressed up again in the modern taste, can
afford no true idea of the Grecian drama. True and faithful translations,
which endeavour in expression and versification to rise to the height of
the original, have as yet been attempted only in Germany. But although our
language is extremely flexible, and in many respects resembling the Greek,
it is after all a battle with unequal weapons; and stiffness and harshness
not unfrequently take the place of the easy sweetness of the Greek. But we
are even far from having yet done all that can perhaps be accomplished: I