long traditions of the Grecian stage, murders that, many centuries
after all the parties to them--perpetrators, sufferers, avengers--had
become dust and ashes, kindled again into mighty life through a thousand
years upon the vast theaters of Athens and Rome, I retraced the horrors,
not prophetic but memorial, with which I myself had invested that
humble dwelling of Dr. S.; and read again, repeated in visionary
proportions, the sufferings which there had darkened the days of people
known to myself through two distinct successions--not, as was natural
to expect, of parents first and then children, but inversely of children
and parents. Manchester was not Mycenae. No, but by many degrees nobler.
In some of the features most favorable to tragic effects, it was so;
and wanted only these idealizing advantages for withdrawing mean details
which are in the gift of distance and hazy antiquity. Even at that day
Manchester was far larger, teeming with more and with stronger hearts;
and it contained a population the most energetic even in the _modern_
world--how much more so, therefore, by comparison with any race in
_ancient_ Greece, inevitably rendered effeminate by dependence too
generally upon slaves. Add to this superior energy in Lanceshire, the
immeasurably profounder feelings generated by the mysteries which stand
behind Christianity, as compared with the shallow mysteries that stood
behind paganism, and it would be easy to draw the inference, that,
in the capacity for the infinite and impassioned, for horror and for
pathos, Mycenae could have had no pretentions to measure herself against
Manchester. Not that I had drawn such an inference myself. Why should
I? there being nothing to suggest the points in which the two cities
differed, but only the single one in which they agreed, viz., the dusky
veil that overshadowed in both the noonday tragedies haunting their
household recesses; which veil was raised only to the gifted eyes of
a Cassandra, or to the eyes that, like my own, had experimentally
become acquainted with them as facts. Pitiably mean is he that measures