to imitate certain travellers, who, on returning from a country which
their readers cannot easily visit, give such exaggerated accounts of it,
and relate so many marvels, as to hazard their own character for veracity.
I shall rather endeavour to characterize them as they appear to me after
sedulous and repeated study, without concealing their defects, and to
bring a living picture of the Grecian stage before the eyes of my hearers.

We shall treat first of the Tragedy of the Greeks, then of their
_Old_ Comedy, and lastly of the _New_ Comedy which arose out of it.

The same theatrical accompaniments were common to all the three kinds. We
must, therefore, give a short preliminary view of the theatre, its
architecture and decorations, that we may have a distinct idea of their
representation.

The histrionic art of the ancients had also many peculiarities: the use of
masks, for example, although these were quite different in tragedy and
comedy; in the former, _ideal_, and in the latter, at least in the Old
Comedy, somewhat caricatured.

In tragedy, we shall first consider what constituted its most distinctive
peculiarity among the ancients: the ideality of the representation, the
prevailing idea of destiny, and the chorus; and we shall lastly treat of
their mythology, as the materials of tragic poetry. We shall then proceed
to characterize, in the three tragedians of whom alone entire works still
remain, the different styles--that is, the necessary epochs in the history
of the tragic art.