mythical poets. The tragedians had only, therefore, to engraft one species
of poetry on another. Certain postulates, and those invariably serviceable
to the air of dignity and grandeur, and the removing of all meanness of
idea, were conceded to them at the very outset. Everything, down to the
very errors and weaknesses of that departed race of heroes who claimed
their descent from the gods, was ennobled by the sanctity of legend. Those
heroes were painted as beings endowed with more than human strength; but,
so far from possessing unerring virtue and wisdom, they were even depicted
as under the dominion of furious and unbridled passions. It was an age of
wild effervescence; the hand of social order had not as yet brought the
soil of morality into cultivation, and it yielded at the same time the
most beneficent and poisonous productions, with the fresh luxuriant
fulness of prolific nature. Here the occurrence of the monstrous and
horrible did not necessarily indicate that degradation and corruption out
of which alone, under the development of law and order, they could arise,
and which, in such a state of things, make them fill us with sentiments of
horror and aversion. The guilty beings of the fable are, if we may be
allowed the expression, exempt from human jurisdiction, and amenable to a
higher tribunal alone. Some, indeed, have advanced the opinion, that the
Greeks, as zealous republicans, took a particular pleasure in witnessing
the representation of the outrages and consequent calamities of the
different royal families, and are almost disposed to consider the ancient
tragedy in general as a satire on monarchical government. Such a party-
view, however, would have deadened the sympathy of the audience, and
consequently destroyed the effect which it was the aim of the tragedy to
produce.

Besides, it must be remarked that the royal families, whose crimes and
consequent sufferings afforded the most abundant materials for affecting
tragical pictures, were the Pelopidae of Mycenae, and the Labdacidae of