example, to assume that form, must always be a most unprofitable and
hopeless attempt.

I have called mythology the chief materials of tragedy. We know, indeed,
of two historical tragedies by Grecian authors: the _Capture of Miletus_,
of Phrynichus, and the _Persians_, of Aeschylus, a piece which still
exists; but these singular exceptions both belong to an epoch when the art
had not attained its full maturity, and among so many hundred examples of
a different description, only serve to establish more strongly the truth
of the rule. The sentence passed by the Athenians on Phrynichus, in which
they condemned him to a pecuniary fine because he had painfully agitated
them by representing on the stage a contemporary calamity, which with due
caution they might, perhaps, have avoided; however hard and arbitrary it
may appear in a judicial point of view, displays, however, a correct
feeling of the proprieties and limits of art. Oppressed by the
consciousness of the proximity and reality of the represented story, the
mind cannot retain that repose and self-possession which are necessary for
the reception of pure tragical impressions. The heroic fables, on the
other hand, came to view at a certain remoteness; and surrounded with a
certain halo of the marvellous. The marvellous possesses the advantage
that it can, in some measure, be at once believed and disbelieved:
believed in so far as it is supported by its connexion with other
opinions; disbelieved while we never take such an immediate interest in it
as we do in what wears the hue of the every-day life of our own
experience. The Grecian mythology was a web of national and local
traditions, held in equal honour as a sequence of religion, and as an
introduction to history; everywhere preserved in full vitality among the
people by ceremonies and monuments, already elaborated for the
requirements of art and the higher species of poetry by the diversified
manner in which it has been handled, and by the numerous epic or merely