especially in the feast of Bacchus, where sacred odes of a grave and serious character, intermixed with episodes of mythological story recited by an actor, were sung by a chorus that danced around the altar. A goat was either the principal sacrifice on these occasions, or the participants, disguised as Satyrs, had a goat-like appearance; and from the two Greek words representing "goat" and "song" we get our word tragedy, [Footnote: From the Greek tragos, "a goat," and o'de, "a song."] or goat-song. At some of the more rustic festivals in honor of the same god the performance was of a more jocose or satirical character; and hence arose the term comedy, [Footnote: From the Greek ko'me, "a village," and o'de, "a song."] from the two Greek words signifying "village" and "song"--village-song. In the teller of mythological legends we find the first germ of dialogue, as the chorus soon came to assist him by occasional question and remark. This feature was introduced by Thespis, a native of Ica'ria, in 535 B.C., under whose direction, and that of Phryn'icus, his pupil, the first feeble rudiments of the drama were established. In this condition it was found by Æschylus, in 500 B.C., who brought a second actor upon the scene; whence arose the increased prominence of the dialogue, and the limitation and subsidiary character of the chorus. Æschylus also added more expressive masks, and various machinery and scenes calculated to improve and enlarge dramatic representation. Of the effect of this new creation upon all kinds of poetical genius we have the following fine illustration from the pen of BULWER:

"It was in the very nature of the Athenian drama that, when once established, it should concentrate and absorb almost every variety of poetical genius. The old lyrical poetry, never much cultivated in Athens, ceased in a great measure when tragedy arose; or, rather, tragedy was the complete development, the new and perfected consummation, of the dithyrambic ode. Lyrical poetry transmigrated into the choral song as the epic merged into the dialogue and plot of the drama. Thus, when we speak of Athenian poetry we speak of dramatic poetry--they were one and the same. In Athens, where audiences were numerous and readers few, every man who felt within himself the inspiration of the poet would necessarily desire to see his poetry put into action--assisted with all the pomp of spectacle and music, hallowed by the solemnity of a religious festival, and breathed by artists elaborately trained to heighten the eloquence of words into the reverent ear of assembled Greece. Hence the multitude of dramatic poets; hence the mighty fertility of each; hence the life and activity of this--the comparative torpor and barrenness of every other-- species of poetry."

1. TRAGEDY.

MELPOM'ENE, one of the nine Muses, whose name signifies "To represent in song," is said to have been the inventress of tragedy, over which she presided, always veiled, bearing in one hand the lyre, as the emblem of her vocation, and in the other a tragic mask. As queen of the lyre, every poet was supposed to proclaim the marvels of her song, and to invoke her aid.

Queen of the lyre, in thy retreat The fairest flowers of Pindus glow, The vine aspires to crown thy seat, And myrtles round thy laurel grow: Thy strings adapt their varied strain To every pleasure, every pain, Which mortal tribes were born to prove; And straight our passions rise or fall, As, at the wind's imperious call, The ocean swells, the billows move.

When midnight listens o'er the slumbering earth, Let me, O Muse, thy solemn whispers hear: When morning sends her fragrant breezes forth, With airy murmurs touch my opening ear, --AKENSIDE.

ÆSCHYLUS.

Æschylus, the first poet who rendered the drama illustrious, and into whose character and writings the severe and ascetic doctrines of Pythagoras entered largely, was born at Eleu'sis, in Attica, in 525 B.C. He fought, as will be remembered, in the combats of Marathon and Salamis, and also in the battle of Platæa. He therefore flourished at the time when the freedom of Greece, rescued from foreign enemies, was exulting in its first strength; and his writings are characteristic of the boldness and vigor of the age. In his works we find the fundamental idea of the Greek drama--retributive justice. The sterner passions alone are appealed to, and the language is replete with bold metaphor and gigantic hyperbole. Venus and her inspirations are excluded; the charms of love are unknown: but the gods--vast, majestic, in shadowy outline, and in the awful sublimity of power-pass before and awe the beholder. [Footnote: see Grote's "History of Greece," Chap. lxvii.] Says a prominent reviewer: "The conceptions of the imagination of Æschylus are remarkable for a sort of colossal sublimity and power, resembling the poetry of the Book of Job; and those poems of his which embody a connected story may be said to resemble the stupendous avenues of the Temple of Elora, [See Index.] with the vast scenes and vistas; its strange, daring, though rude sculptures; its awful, shadowy, impending horrors. Like the architecture, the poems, too, seem hewn out of some massy region of mountain rock. Æschylus appears as an austere poet-soul, brooding among the grand, awful, and terrible myths which have floated from a primeval world, in which traditions of the Deluge, of the early, rudimental struggle between barbaric power and nascent civilization, were still vital."

"The personal temperament of the man," says DR. PLUMPTRE, [Footnote: "The Tragedies of Æschylus," by E. H. Plumptre, D.D.] seems to have been in harmony with the characteristics of his genius. Vehement, passionate, irascible; writing his tragedies, as later critics judged, as if half drunk; doing (as Sophocles said of him) what was right in his art without knowing why; following the impulses that led him to strange themes and dark problems, rather than aiming at the perfection of a complete, all-sided culture; frowning with shaggy brows, like a wild bull, glaring fiercely, and bursting into a storm of wrath when annoyed by critics or rival poets; a Marlowe rather than a Shakspeare: this is the portrait sketched by one who must have painted a figure still fresh in the minds of the Athenians. [Footnote: Aristophanes, in The Frogs.] Such a man, both by birth and disposition, was likely to attach himself to the aristocratic party, and to look with scorn on the claims of the demos to a larger share of power; and there is hardly a play in which some political bias in that direction may not be traced."

Æschylus wrote his plays in trilogies, or three successive dramas connected. Of the eighty tragedies that he wrote, only seven have been preserved. From three of these, The Persians, Prome'theus, and Agamemnon, we have given extracts descriptive of historical and mythological events. The latter is the first of three plays on the fortunes of the house of A'treus, of Myce'næ; and these three, of which the Choëph'oroe and Eumenides are the other two, are the only extant specimen of a trilogy. The Agamemnon is the longest, and by some considered the grandest, play left us by Æschylus. "In the Agamemnon," says VON SCHLEGEL, "it was the intention of Æschylus to exhibit to us a sudden fall from the highest pinnacle of prosperity and renown into the abyss of ruin. The prince, the hero, the general of the combined forces of the Greeks, in the very moment of success and the glorious achievement of the destruction of Troy, the fame of which is to be re-echoed from the mouths of the greatest poets of all ages, in the very act of crossing the threshold of his home, after which he had so long sighed, and amidst the fearless security of preparations for a festival, is butchered, according to the expression of Homer, 'like an ox in the stall,' slain by his faithless wife, his throne usurped by her worthless seducer, and his children consigned to banishment or to hopeless servitude." [Footnote: "Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature," by Augustus William on Schlegel. Black's translation.]

Among the fine passages of this play, the death of Agamemnon, at the hand of Clytemnes'tra, is a scene that the poet paints with terrible effect. Says MR. EUGENE LAWRENCE, [Footnote: "A Primer of Greek Literature," by Eugene Lawrence, p.55.] "Mr. E. C. Stedman's version of the death of Agamemnon is an excellent one. A horror rests upon the palace at Mycenæ; there is a scent of blood, the exhalations of the tomb. The queen, Clytemnestra, enters the inner room, terrible as Lady Macbeth. A cry is heard:

"'Agam. Woe's me! I'm stricken a deadly blow within!' "'Chor. Hark! who is't cries "a blow?" Who meets his death?' "'Agam. Woe's me! Again! again! a second time I'm stricken!' "'Chor. The deed, methinks, from the king's cry, is done.'

At length the queen appears, standing at her full height, terrible, holding her bloody weapon in her hand. She seeks no concealment. She proclaims her guilt:

"'I smote him! nor deny that thus I did it; So that he could not flee or ward off doom. A seamless net, as round a fish, I cast About him, yea, a deadly wealth of robe, Then smote him twice; and with a double cry He loosed his limbs; and to him fallen I gave Yet a third thrust, a grace to Hades, lord Of the under-world and guardian of the dead.'"

But the most finished of the tragedies of Æschylus is Choëphoroe, which is made the subject of the revenge of Ores'tes, son of Agamemnon, who avenges the murder of his father by putting his mother to death. For this crime the Eumenides represents him as being driven insane by the Furies; but his reason was subsequently restored. It is the chief object of the poet, in this tragedy, to display the distress of Orestes at the necessity he feels of avenging his father's death upon his mother. To this BYRON refers in Childe Harold:

O thou! who never yet of human wrong Left the unbalanced scale--great Nem'esis! Thou who didst call the Furies from the abyss, And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss For that unnatural retribution--just, Had it but been from hands less near--in this, Thy former realm, I call thee from the dust!

At the close of an interesting characterization of Æschylus and his works--much too long for a full quotation here--PROFESSOR MAHAFFY observes as follows:

"We always feel that Æschylus thought more than he expressed,