Edict of Nantes.

Racine, however, was in the height of his fame; he was de Maintenon's poet. It was for the use of her establishment at St. Cyr that he wrote 'Athalie' and 'Esther."* But with her customary heartless selfishness, she abandoned "her poet" in his disgrace.

Darker and darker grew the clouds that lowered over the closing years of that long eventful reign. Domestic troubles, the terrible and mysterious deaths of the Dauphin and Dauphine, the plots and cabals of the bastards and the legitimates, an empty treasury, a beggared people, villages depopulated by war and by the Huguenot exodus, weak ministers, incapable generals; the crushing defeats of Hochstadt, Ramilies, Turin, Õudenarde, Malplaquet; France, stripped of her conquests, suing for peace; the King, broken in health, devoured by remorse, insidiously governed by a withered, rheumatic old woman, cowering over the fire in the gloomy celllike chamber at Marly, querulously complaining, weeping, groaning. What a change from the France of Colbert, of Condé, and Turenne! What a change from the lover of la Vallière and de Montespan!

But the end of all was at hand; in August 1715 Louis was seized with a fatal illness, in which he suffered great agony, but endured with noble fortitude. During the sad time Madame de Maintenon showed little or no sensibility; her eyes were dry, her face cold and resigned. A Catholic by profession, and doubtless by conviction, she was by nature a Calvinist -cold, sour, fatalistic. Four days before

the King's death she left him and retired to St.-Cyr. He took this much to heart, and never ceased asking for her until she was compelled to return. Two days after his death she was again at St.-Cyr, calmly arranging her chamber and superintend ing the affairs of the establishment as if nothing had happened.t

Beyond a few of his immediate attendants Louis was little regretted, even by his own children. The nation "trembled with joy." Overwhelmed with taxation, crushed beneath the horrors of unceasing war, the despairing people offered up thanks to God for their deliverance; a hideous nightmare, a nightmare of priestcraft, of war, of famine, seemed to have been lifted from off them. Louis had outlived his age.

From the day that she finally returned to St.-Cyr her foot never again passed beyond its gloomy cloisters. Orleans continued her pension to the last; but in the hour that Louis passed away her star was extinguished, and the great world thought of her no more. She received but few visitors, only those with whom she had been intimate at Marly. The duc de Maine, however, spent three or four hours with her in each week, and her affection for him never cooled. She died in 1719, at the age of eighty-four.

And for such a life and for such an end, unloving and unloved, she had lied, and schemed, and betrayed, repressed every natural instinct, and played the hypocrite, for forty years! The game was scarcely worth the candle.-Temple Bar.

In the latter production she herself figured as Esther, de Montespan as Vashti, Louvois as Aman.

+ She had shown a similar callousness at the death of the Dauphine, to whom she had always pretended to be greatly attached. She was at St.-Cyr during the agony of that unfortunate

princess, although she was well aware that a fatal termination to her illness was imminent. When the Duchess and afterwards the Duke of Bur gundy were attacked with scarlet fever the King attended upon both until the last hour, but Madame de Maintenon was not with them.

If it be lawful to grieve over a dead past, to mourn lost Lycidas or wish to restore to the world's regrets Titian's Peter Martyr or Lionardo's Cenacola; if we may wish back again Roman civic virtue, Italian culture, Mediæval romance; if it be not right only to acquiesce in all the ruins of changeful time, and conform to the cold faith that whatever is is best, then surely our keenest regrets must be given to Greek beauty, lost to us now as irrecoverably as the face of Alcibiades and the sound of Demosthenes' voice. Regret is always unavailing: yet love is fed by regret; and we cannot love past beauty without wishing it once more present. The law of ceaseless change is as fixed as that of disease and death may we not also mourn for our present lives that they cannot taste the delights either of the past or of the future? The beauty of a child dies alike whether the child lives or not. We weep for the maiden Basilo and the boy Quintilian. Why not also for the beauty of the young Augustus lost in the unloveliness of his manhood, for the voice of the young chorister, for the sunset of yesterday?

So it is with Greek beauty. The great god Pan is dead. That sense of harmony which dwelt in the souls of Phidias and Sophocles is now but the echo and the shadow of a shape and a sound, once living to delight a loving world, now stored up, shelved and numbered in museums and libraries, the property of cities and pedants or at best, and for those who love it, only existing in ruin. Alas! we do but deceive ourselves if we think that we can understand the symmetry of a Greek statue or the rhythm of a Greek poem. Our eyes are clouded by modern art, even as our ears are infected by the grating sound of modern vowels and consonants, which must needs serve to represent to us the harmony of the Greek language. Greek beauty is not for us. What it was to those who lived when Greek art was living we can but guess. We cannot know as the Greeks knew. Nor can its worshippers and imitators revive it. What are Keats and Goethe, what are Thorwaldsen and Flaxman, but barbarian guards of a royal sepulchre? The forms that issue from it are but those of "Grecian ghosts that in

battle were slain," bearing like Deiphobus in the Æneid the ugly scars and stains of their contest with devouring time. Shall we not grieve for this?

There is a picture, well known to many of our readers, painted by an artist who has as pure a love of beauty and faith in Greek ideals as any living or dead. It represents a group of musicians in Greek dress; noble figures such as we may fancy Sophocles to have been in the pride of his manhood. Above their heads lies a gi gantic bass viol. Each holds a wooden instrument, violin, tenor or violoncello : and lovely women stand by with arms twined round each other and listen to their music. The conceit is pretty-it is the homage of modern to ancient art. Yet it seems to us to be almost grotesque. We cannot conceive that any but Gothic sounds can come from those romantic fiddles: we cannot believe that Phidias or Plato could have endured the discords and resolutions of modern music. But suppose the idea inverted. Paint four modern musicians with thoughtful German faces transformed by the beauty of sound, and place in their hands and at their lips the Doric flute and the Lesbian lyre and this would represent in an allegory the attitude of modern minds trying to reproduce to themselves the absolute grace and severity which charms and awes us as we listen "with dull and tuneless ear" at the closed doors of that temple of harmony.

We will, to make the contrast more plain, take a few instances in different arts where the modern spirit has tried to represent the Greek spirit to a later age, or clothe itself in Greek forms. One of the noblest of Mendelssohn's works is his "Antigone." Those who have heard it performed as it is given in some of the theatres of Germany, with a good orchestra, a sufficient mise en scène and competent actors, will allow that it is capable of affording high pleasure to cultivated minds. As the greatness of "Hamlet" or " Othello" makes itself felt through the rantings of a strolling band of players, so the splendor of the genius of Sophocles is obscured, but not hidden, by all the shortcomings of the German stage. The high human interest of the story, the contrast and play of character, the balance of inci

dent, the severe dramatic propriety are present to our minds as they may have been to the minds of Athenians who listened to the play two thousand years ago. There the ancient and the modern meets on equal ground-or perhaps the modern has the advantage; for modern poets have sounded the diapason of human feeling with even a more masterly touch than the ancients whom they have followed; and the modern spectator is accustomed to more subtle analysis and no less lofty a conception than the Greek. But this is the spirit, not the form. The form is modern, Gothic, almost barbarous. Classical dictionaries and disquisitions on the Greek theatre prescribe the position of the altar, the number of the chorus, the proper doors for exit and entrance. The Greek verse is correctly translated into heroics more or less sonorous. The result is a work of art which to our ears and eyes is harmonious as well as exalted in sentiment. But the effect is German, not Greek, except so far as what is human is akin all the world over. As far as the resuscitation of a Greek tragedy is concerned, we would gladly give up all the resources of modern music employed with the profound knowledge and fastidious taste of Mendelssohn, if we could hear the simple strains of that music which Sophocles accepted as truly in tune with his own dramatic conceptions, and the more than musical harmonies of the Greek language modulated by the voice of Greek players.*

In the dramatic attempts of our own country this contrast is more strongly marked To take a familiar instance : an adaptation of the tragedy of "Medea" has lately been seen on the English stage, in which the genius of a single actor has had power to interest spectators of all classes. Of Miss Bateman we would say "ingenio valet non arte." She has the natural instinct of an actress, and the instincts which are the growth of experience and education: but not, in our judgment, that knowledge of and sympathy with Greek art which is essential to a worthy rendering of so great a theme. And,

The subject of the relation between ancient and modern tragedy has been treated with much skill and feeling by Mr. J. A. Symonds, in the ninth chapter of his "Studies of the Greek Poets," a work full of instruction and suggestion to those who are or who are not acquainted with Greek Literature itself.

therefore, in spite of the merits of Miss Bateman's impersonation of Medea, we feel uneasily that this is not Greek, and would rather that she were called by some other name and clothed in some other garb. But if Medea comes short of perfection, what are we to say of the rest of the troupe and of the play itself? Euripides is degraded to commonplace English verse; and most of the actors-it would seem-barely tolerate the ungracious parts which they sustain in order to support the principal figure. Such a fault would be impossible in a real Greek play. What Shakespeare effected by genius the Greeks effected by art: none of the personages introduced are superfluous or uninteresting, like those wordy abstractions which crowd Schiller's stage; all is in its place and to the purpose. But to return to our English "Medea." The dresses are tawdry or shabby; the scenery commonplace; the whole conception of the play is realistic: so much so, that on the one hand the metrical rhythm often sounds constrained, and on the other we do not feel shocked when Medea-O Horace !

thrusts a knife into her children's bodies, coram populo, in the midst of a huddling, shouting crowd of kw‡à прóσшяа. The fact is that author and actors alike are ignorant or have forgotten that Greek art in all things will have perfection: there is no à peu près in it. By instinct and by convention which sanctioned instinct the Greek of the great age thought and wrote right: and any attempt to represent Greek subjects as the Greeks represented them is intolerable if the treatment of them is not absolutely severe. And this severity is not attainable by modern artists. This is the secret of the distaste we feel when we hear Jason or Creon employing gestures. which belong to English stage tradition, or supported by the cheap illusions of stage scenery and perspective. In the Greek drama there is no illusion: it is more akin to sculpture than painting; the atmosphere of gods and heroes is congenial to it; the sea and sky of Attica are its proper scenery; the measured movement of trimeter verse is its native speech.

Goethe's" Iphigenie" is generally quoted as the great model and instance of the modern antique. But is it a real reproduction of the antique? In many points it approaches the Greek closely, especially in the choric songs and gnomic sentences

which are put into the mouths of the principal characters for want of a chorus. But it is not a single, flawless work. It is a combination of classical and moderna greater poem, it may be, but a less complete work of art than either of two plays with which it will bear comparison-Schiller's "Braut von Messina," and Milton's "Samson Agonistes." Whilst the form of the play is in many respects classical, the interest of the action, as Mr. Lewes has well pointed out, rests on situations and developments of character which are rather modern than classical in their spirit. And what is the result? "Iphigenie" is coldly admired. We acknowledge its perfect workmanshin; but it does not touch us we are touched by every page of "Hermann and Dorothea," where neither scene nor manner is too remote to win the full sympathy of the poet.

In the "Bride of Messina" Schiller adopts, with some variations, the Greek tragic method, including the chorus, which Goethe discards. The introduction of the chorus, it is obvious, does away with all illusion. But Schiller, in his interesting preface to the play, disclaims illusion. This absence of illusion, this control of emotion is, he says, the great recommendation of the chorus. The heroic drama must not be too emotional it must, like all true art, point the way from an actual to a possible stage. Schiller keeps so well in sight these fundamentals of Greek tragedy, that his work, though not Greek in form, creates in modern minds, we may believe, somewhat the same effect which was created by a play of Æschylus, and yet he nowhere imitates directly.

Compared with "Samson Agonistes," "Iphigenie" is less studied and less classical. In Milton's tragedy the happy adaptation of Greek method and Greek sentiment to a Hebrew subject produces the effect of art without a too painful sense of imitation. Yet "Samson Agonistes" is a stupendous tour de force. No poet but No poet but Milton has had like him the power of assimilating literature of all kinds and fusing it into his own magnificent diction. Witness the whole of "Paradise Lost," in which there is hardly a line that is not echoed from some recollection of Greek, Latin, or Italian poetry; and yet it is all his own. It is something of this power of assimilation executed in a different direc

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tion, which enables Mr. Jebb to think in Empedoclean hexameters, and transfer Mr. Browning's philosophy into the rigid metres of Pindar. It is true that the sense of difficulty overcome is inseparable from a translation, and particularly a translation into a classical language, and interferes with our perfect pleasure in reading. it. But how perfectly is that difficulty overcome in "Tithonus," in "Lælius," and “ ἀνάμνησις" ! These wonderful translations (we know nothing to stand near them except a few of Mr. Munro's happiest efforts) are not merely imitations of the classics; they are written, as it were, from the very heart of the antique. But we must rot take them for more than they claim to be. They are genis, not statues; perfect works of art, but not to be classed with original poems such as those of which we have spoken. Indeed, the strain of sustaining the burden for long would be intolerable, from the tediousness of elaborating at length what should be produced by enthusiasm for the original; that alone makes a translation possible, and it seldom supports a translator to the end of a lengthy work.

It happens that the distance at which Goethe's " Iphigenie" stands from the Greek may be gauged by a real curiosity of literature, a Greek translation of the tragedy, faultless in grammar and metre, carried out with admirable skill and fidelity by a German professor. The result is a literary work which resembles a Greek tragedy, much in the same degree as Madame Tussaud's wax model resembles Frederick the Great. But Goethe is not to be arraigned for this. He spent no pedantic pains to make his workmanship like the antique. He possessed the Greek spirit as few moderns have possessed it; but writing in harmony with the Greek spirit, he did not greatly care merely to reproduce it; he thought more of his own Iphigenia than of her of the Greek poets. And, after all, he did not set "Iphigenie" among his greatest works.

The contrast of methods may be made more striking by referring to two entirely opposite treatments of a Greek subject"Atalanta in Calydon," and "Balaustion." In the first the Greek model is closely imitated; and in spite of the strain of Biblical language and thought which runs here and there through the work, the style and diction of Greek tra