respondence and interchange between the promoters of Phonetic science of Saxony and the United States. It bears the signature of M. Hugo Häpe, the president of the Royal Institute and Councilor of the Regency. The functions of the institute are to stenograph the transactions of the government, to train a corps of stenographers, and promote the advancement and perfection of the stenographic art. It publishes a stenographic periodical folio; one third of each page is in stenography, and the remaining two thirds furnish its expansion into long hand.

We advise most earnestly that the art of phonography be introduced into our seminaries and colleges. Especially and immediately do we advise its encouragement in our institutes for preparing our ministry, and its acquirement by every young man in our ministry. Of its ultimate adoption into normal schools, high schools, and public schools, we cherish a firm hope.

(29.) "The Christian Repository and Ladies' Magazine, Devoted to Religion and Literature. A. OWEN, Editor." (8vo., pp. 64. Dayton, Ohio: Published for the United Brethren in Christ, by Vonneida & Sowers.) A spirited repository of literature, both original and selected. It is done up with talent, and tasteful external finish. Its religious tone is pure, while its air is frank and clear upon the great questions of truth and righteousness.

ART. XII.-LITERARY ITEMS.

Analecta Nicæna: Fragments relating to the Council of Nice. The Syriac Text from an ancient MS. in the British Museum. With Translation and Notes. By B. Harris Cowper. This publication contains the last letter of Constantine, summoning the Council of Nice, and a most complete and authentic recension of the catalogue of subscribing fathers, from a MS. of great antiquity.

Of Bengel's Gnomon of the New Testament, two volumes are translated and ready. The remaining three volumes will be published early in 1858.

The works of Rev. R. Knight are favorably noticed, namely: The Doctrine of Scriptural Predestination, with Remarks upon the Baptismal Question. Also, a Critical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.

A Dissertation on Sacred Chronology, containing Scriptural Evidence to show that the Creation of Man took place 5,833 years before Christ. By Rev. N. Reuse. With a few pages on the Egyptian Dynasties of Manetho.

New editions are in press, by Oliphant & Sons, Edinburgh, of Dr. John Pye Smith's celebrated work, The Scripture

Testimony to the Messiah; and also his work, The Sacrifice and Priesthood of Jesus Christ and the Atonement and Redemption thence Accruing.

Mr. Maurice has lately published Five Sermons on the Indian Crisis. Also a Series of Lectures on Christian Ethics, founded on the Epistles of St. John.

Personal Recollections of the Last Four Popes, by Cardinal Wiseman.

Homer and the Homeric Age, by Right Honorable William E. Gladstone, M.P. 3 vols. Svo., from the Oxford University Press.

Constable & Co. have issued the tenth volume of the collected works of Dugald Stewart, containing Biographical Memoirs of Adam Smith, Dr. Robertson, and Dr. Thomas Reid. A memoir of Dugald Stewart, with Selections from his Correspondence, is prefixed, by John Veitch, M.A.

The Stars and the Angels; or the Natural History of the Universe and its Inhabitants.

Essays, Scientific, Political, and Speculative, by Herbert Spencer. Chiefly reprint ed from the Quarterly Reviews, and said to be able.

THE

METHODIST QUARTERLY REVIEW.

JULY, 1858.

ART. I.-ATTIC TRAGEDY AND THE MODERN THEATER.

DRAMATIC literature has formed a large and interesting part of the republic of letters for more than two thousand years. Dramatic show, or the theater, for a still longer period has held the rank and influence of a popular and well patronized institution; and this, too, in the face of a learned, moral, and uncompromising opposition lasting from Plato to the Puritans, and not yet ended. A literature is the expression of a nation's life; of its genius, knowledge, taste, and skill; is the work of individuals, but the common possession of all. Moreover, each form of literature is a typal manifestation of some power, want, or aspiration in the soul. The mere love of knowledge will preserve for us the dry chronicle, the dryer genealogy, and the national myths; but blend with this the love of heroism and beauty, and then will the skeleton chronicles and dim myths be transfigured into a lively and picturesque epic. So, too, ideals, without a pattern of which nothing in man's world has been made, fed from their mystic springs of joy and sadness, cannot always sing their inner song to the heart that owns them, but must utter them; and lyric poetry is at once their expression and satisfaction. And so, too, art is a symbol of a profound want in human nature, underlying and creating it. But there is also a human eclectic faculty; and the Greeks, God's ancient people, chosen to preach the gospel of the beautiful to their own and to all ages, were notably eclectic in matters pertaining to the manly and the beautiful, no less in literature than in art. Homer's epic is immortal, and the Greek lyrics are among the finest we have; yet from these the Greek wrought out the grander form of dramatic poetry. The epic is historical, is an echo, a memory, a shadow of the past; the lyric is emotional, a mood of FOURTH SERIES, VOL. X.-23

mind, a song; the drama, of which tragedy is the noblest form, is both these and more. The epic is a corpse galvanized; the lyric is a dream, but tragedy is life." Tragedy on its poetic side is the substantial marriage of the epic and the lyric, graced by the subservience of minor species of poetry; in its subject-matter it is an exhibition of the eternal laws of truth and justice applied to individuals, to society, and to states. It is activity and energy, embellished by dignity, grace, and pathos. And naturally, from the relation of the dramatic to other forms of literature, many of the best poets have been dramatists, and among its votaries are some of the finest intellects of the race.

On the other hand, theatrical or dramatic exhibitions, of some kind, are next to the pleasures of the chase in their universality and antiquity. From the combined use which they make of poetry, music, painting, scenic decorations, elocution, and action, they are capable of doing great good in the way of rational amusement and mental culture; but are doing immense mischief by a prostitution of their high functions to a pandering to a vulgar taste and false notions, and to the opening up of facile avenues whereby fleshly lusts creep into our social life and corrupt it. Yet, with all its vices, essential and accidental, the theater still forms a marked feature of the social organization of our large cities. Towns and villages, too, show the tenacious hold the stage has upon the popular feeling, by sending crowds to witness the bizarre theatricals of some strolling company. To measure the demerit of modern dramatic performances, we have selected, as a standard of comparison, Attic tragedy of the age of Pericles.

Of dramatic literature the tragic is the highest form. The former shows us both the earnest and the sportive, the serious and the comic sides of human life, the latter the earnest and the serious only: the one covers the broadest field; the other deals in matters of the weightiest moment. And Attic tragedy, as it was in the splendid days of the literary, commercial, and political supremacy of Athens, combined a moral aim and a religious spirit with great literary excellences. It was remarkable for its brief duration and local limit: three names, one century, and the city of Athens, comprehended its excellence and earned its lasting fame. The history of Greek literature reaches back three thousand years. Of these thirty centuries, the fifth B. C. sufficed for the full birth, maturity, and degeneracy of tragedy in its essential characteristics of beauty, dignity, and ideal truth. To understand Greek tragedy, there is no need of inquiry into the progressive stages of its historic development from the rude and hilarious ceremonies in honor of Bacchus ; for these are no essential part of it. When Eschylus appeared,

Bacchus and his troop of satyrs had been dismissed from the stage; his altar, the thymele, converted into a chorus stand; the choral odes were no longer Bacchic hymns, but the sentiments of an idealized spectator, the expression of the thoughts and feelings suggested by the action of the play. The plots were not of the fabulous fortunes and symbolic life and death of Dionysus, but of the mythic, heroic, and historical events in Grecian history. We may also dismiss the dithyrambs, the faces daubed with wine-lees, the Thespian cart and monologues; for however full of historic value and antiquarian interest these may be, yet Greek tragedy must be studied in Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. They were the master tragedians. Although in and out of their own times, at Athens and elsewhere, good tragedies were written, and to some of which judges assigned the tragic prize over the heads of these princes of tragedy themselves, still the public voice of Athens, and the concurring judgment of successive ages, have assigned to these three seats on the tragic throne. A peerless trio in their day, and an imitated but almost inimitable model for after times, and by none nearer approached than by Schiller in his latest plays. Considering the peculiar fascination of the drama and the universality of mimic representations, it is a matter of surprise that cultivated nations have been without it. The Semitic have no drama. The Jew has no theater; and this, too, with a history full of dramatic incidents, as the Exodus, Samson's exploits, the civil wars of the houses of David and Saul; in fact, Jewish history is tragedy paraphrased. It has the unities of time, action, and place, and is the vindication of the laws of truth and justice in the struggles, crimes, passion, and sufferings of men. The Bible contains no drama. The nearest to it is the Book of Job; but that is more epic than dramatic. Arabians, Egyptians, and Persians were rich in literary compositions, but they lacked the dramatic. The Chaldeans were learned, but they knew nothing of it. It is the glory and the high poetic achievement of the Indo-Caucasian race; and tragedy in its truest and most graceful expression, was the product of the Greek mind.

We profess to be no blind admirers of whatever pertains to a classic antiquity. Granting that Greek literature is a treasury of poetry, science, art, cloquence, and heroism; and that the Greek himself was a model of the true scholarly self-abandonment to a literary vocation, whereby a high success is alone attainable, nevertheless, for the American student of to-day, a knowledge of German literature in the original, with all its vices, theologic and philosophic, is better than a knowledge of the Greek; a broader scholar

ship and a higher humanity in it, arising from the fact that Christianity has exerted so large an influence in modern civilization, and has thus given the modern a stand-point of thought and feeling far beyond that of the most favored Greek or Roman. This is a general statement, for in the special case of Greek tragedy, as exemplified in the extant plays of the three masters, there must be conceded a dignity, harmony, pathos, unity of plot, precision, and naturalness, and artistic merit of stage decorations and arrangements, which place it beyond the mere life-like and imitative, and elevate it to the standard of a moral ideal, "whereby are brought into living exhibition the deeply grounded ideas of eternal right, of whose laws, fixed and immutable as nature herself, even the gods are made ministers."* The popular mythology of the Greeks was rich in tragic materials, especially the two ancient houses of the Labdacid and Pelopida. The mythic element, however, was not essential to tragedy, as the Persa, a purely historical play, witnesses. Current politics and history, too, gave tone and color to both tragedy and comedy.

We now propose briefly to present some of the leading excellences of this form of mental activity, which so delighted an Athenian audience that they would sit, with a few intermissions, an entire day, witnessing, with a critical delight, plays sustained throughout at a high level of poetic beauty and didactic morality. On the reader of Greek tragedy no impression derived therefrom is more distinct than the love of the beautiful and of nature.

The Greeks were the most felicitous of mortals. Lively, versatile, imaginative, and enthusiastic, they loved and worshiped the beautiful. Their inner life seemed as jocund as a June morning, and a part of the sweet, round day. They had and owned a delightful climate, picturesque scenery, the bluest skies, and splendid sunrises and sunsets. No wonder, then, they loved out-door life. They studied, sacrificed, played, prayed, and dramatized in the open air. They loved this wholesome nature, and from the grand fullness of their sensuous life, peopled earth, air, and sea, with gods, and all their gods were comely beings. They could not tolerate, without some relief, a bloated Bacchus, and hence the legend that in his youth Bacchus was a beautiful boy. Pluto, the infernal god, was noble-looking and had splendid eyes. people have ever had more right to the name, Children of the Sun. The old and young, man and maid, when dying, leave life with fond regrets at parting with the sun and his bright beams as with a companion tenderly loved. Hades is dreaded because it is sunless. Ajax bids his final adieu to the day and the sun, his native land, the fountains, * Jacobs, Leben u. Kunst des Alterth., ii, 307.

No