ed to the comic Drama. But their fortunes have been unequal; for while the name of Thespis is still united with every thing dramatic, that of Susarion has fallen into oblivion, and is only known to antiquaries.

The Drama in Greece, as afterwards in Britain, had scarce begun to develope itself from barbarism, ere, with the most rapid strides, it advanced towards perfection. Thespis and Susarion flourished about four hundred and forty or fifty years before the Christian era. The battle of Marathon was fought in the year 490 before Christ; and it was upon Eschylus, one of the Athenian generals on that memorable occasion, that Greece conferred the honoured title of the Father of Tragedy. We must necessarily judge of his efforts, by that which he did, not by that which he left undone; and if some of his regulations may sound strange in modern ears, it is but just to compare the state in which he found the Drama, with that in which he left it.

Eschylus was the first who, availing himself of the invention of a stage by Thespis, introduced upon the boards a plurality of actors at the same time, and converted into action and dialogue, accompanied or relieved at intervals by the musical performance of the Chorus, the dull monologue of the Thespian orator. It was Eschylus, also, who introduced the deceptions of scenery; stationary, indeed, and therefore very different from the decorations of our stage, but still giving a reality to the whole performance, which could not fail to afford pleasure to those who beheld, for the first

time, an effort to surround the player, while invested with his theatrical character, with scenery which might add to the illusions of the representation. This was not all: A theatre, at first of wood, but afterwards of stone, circumscribed, while it accommodated, the spectators, and reduced a casual and disorderly mob to the quality and civilisation of a regular and attentive audience.

The most remarkable effect of the tragedy of Eschylus, was the introduction of the Chorus in a new character, which continued long to give a peculiar tone to the Grecian Drama, and still makes the broad and striking difference betwixt that original theatre, and those which have since arisen in modern nations.

The Chorus, who sung hymns in favour of Bacchus, the musical part, in short, of the entertainment,—remained in the days of Thespis exactly such as it had been in the rude village gambols which he had improved, the principal part of the dramatic performance. The intervention of monologue, or recitation, was merely a relief to the musicians, and a variety to the audience. Æschylus, while he assigned a part of superior consequence to the actor in his improved dialogue, new-modelled the Chorus, which custom still enjoined as a necessary and indispensable branch of the entertainment. They were no longer a body of vocal musicians, whose strains were as independent of what was spoken by the personages of the Drama, as those of our modern orchestra when performing betwixt the acts; the Chorus assumed from this

time a different and complicated character, which, as we have already hinted, forms a marked peculiarity in the Grecian Drama, distinguishing it from the theatrical compositions of modern Europe.

The Chorus, according to this new model, was composed of a certain set of persons, priests, captive virgins, matrons, or others, usually of a solemn and sacred character, the contemporaries of the heroes who appeared on the stage, who remained upon the scene to celebrate in hymns set to music the events which had befallen the active persons of the Drama; to afford them alternately their advice or their sympathy; and, at least, to moralize, in lyrical poetry, on the feelings to which their history and adventures, their passions and sufferings, gave rise. The Chorus might be considered as, in some degree, the representatives of the audience, or rather of the public, on whose great stage those events happen in reality, which are presented in the mimicry of the Drama. In the strains of the Chorus, the actual audience had those feelings suggested to them, as if by reflection in a mirror, which the events of the scene ought to produce in their own bosom; they had at once before them the action of the piece, and the effect of that action upon a chosen band of persons, who, like themselves, were passive spectators, whose dignified strains pointed out the moral reflections to which the subject naturally gave rise. The Chorus were led or directed by a single person of their number, termed the Coryphæus, who frequently spoke or sung alone. They were occasionally divided into two bands,

who addressed and replied to each other. But they always preserved the character proper to them, of spectators, rather than agents in the Drama.

The number of the Chorus varied at different periods, often extending to fifty persons, and sometimes restricted to half that number; and it is evident that the presence of so many persons on the scene officiating as no part of the dramatis personæ, but rather as contemporary spectators, involved many inconveniences and inconsistencies. That which the hero, however agitated by passion, must naturally have suppressed within his own breast, or uttered in soliloquy, was thus necessarily committed to the confidence of fifty people, less or more. And when a deed of violence was to be acted, the helpless Chorus, instead of interfering to prevent the atrocity to which the perpetrator had made them privy, could only, by the rules of the theatre, exhaust their sorrow and surprise in dithyrambics. This was well ridiculed by Bentley, in his farce called The Wishes, in one part of which strange performance he introduced a Chorus after the manner of the ancient Greeks, who are informed by one of the dramatis persona, that a madman with a firebrand has just entered the vaults beneath the place which they occupy, and which contain a magazine of gunpowder. The Chorus, instead of stirring from the dangerous vicinity, immediately commence a long complaint of the hardship of their fate, exclaiming pathetically, "O, unhappy madman—or rather unhappy we, the victims of this madman's fury-or thrice, thrice unhappy the friends of the madman, who did not secure him,

and restrain him from the perpetration of such deeds of frenzy-or three and four times hapless the keeper of the magazine, who forgot the keys in the door," &c. &c. &c.1

The real Choruses of the ancients, of whose apathy and passive observation of the enormities which pass on the stage, the above is a caricature, afford some instances not much less ridiculous. But still the union which Eschylus accomplished betwixt the didactic hymns of the Chorus, and the events which were passing upon the stage, was a most important improvement upon the earlier Drama. By this means, the two unconnected branches of the old Bacchanalian revels were combined together; and we ought rather to be surprised that Eschylus ventured, while accomplishing such a union, to render the hymns sung by the Chorus subordinate to the action or dialogue, than that he did not take the bolder measure of altogether discarding that which, before his time, was reckoned the principal object of a religious entertainment.

The new theatre and stage of Athens was reared, as we have seen, under the inspection of Eschylus. He also introduced dresses in character for his principal actors, to which were added embellishments of a kind which mark the wide distinction betwixt the ancient and modern stage. The personal disguise which had formerly been attained by staining the actor's face, was now, by what doubtless was considered as a high exertion of ingenuity,

1 The author never read The Wishes, and quotes from the information of a friend.