to adjust the conflicting claims of the reforming spirit, which will always have enough to do while human depravity continues, and of the conservative principle which is equally necessary to protect what is valuable and exalting, against a ruthless vandalism of moral efficiencies; to guard the temple of God from either pollution or ruin, while we suffer and even invite every repair which it may need through the violence with which men have assailed it; here is surely demanded, most urgently demanded, the concentration of wisdom, of learning, of energy mingled with gentleness, and, more than all, of a deeply rooted and mature religion. Our own country presents at this moment an immense mass of mind intensely excited, we had almost said volcanic. Our age manifestly has aroused itself to the thought, however misshapen, of a higher excellence than it has reached, to the aspiration, however misguided, after a nobler idea than it has realized. It is sleeplessly striving and reaching after what it depicts to itself as good. It is, as it were, another Orpheus, going even into the shades in search of a lost Euridice. An inward impulse has been excited urging our nature forth after its long wandering Psyche. There is a weeping over its desolations, a voice of supplication for some mightier than Herculean strength to meet the power of death at its very portals, to join in fiercest fight with the Prince of Demons, and compel him to give back its mourned and buried Alcestis. That cry will yet be answered. That voice will yet receive a full response. Man shall yet look again on the departed form of holiness, and clasp it to his bosom; celestial love and the parted soul rejoined and exulting in eternal youth. God has cast our lot in that interesting age wherein we must be false both to him and to our own nature, if we refuse to deplore the evil, and to toil for the good, to mingle in the prayer, to breathe after the blessing, to throw forward all our energies for the entire disenthralment and exaltation of man. God grant that we may so fulfil the obligations which we cannot escape as, not only to embalm our names in the memories of saints on earth, but to unite them with those which we now associate with spirits whose good fight is fought, whose course is finished, whose crown is won!

ART. V. REVIEW OF STUART'S EDIPUS TYRANNUS.

BY REV. ALFRED ADDIS, Edenton, N. C.

The Edipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, with Notes and a Critique on the subject of the Play. By I. W. Stuart, Professor of Greek and Roman Literature in the College of South Carolina. 1837.

We always hail with pleasure any elementary production, that promises to advance the cause of exegetical literature in the interesting department of the Greek Theatre. We do not pretend to be enthusiastic admirers of the Athenian stage. We certainly prefer the picturesque spirit of the romantic drama of the moderns to the cold, rigid, plastic conformations of the antique school. The subject of the plots of the ancients is not in unison with the spirit, taste, genius, manners, sentiments, religion, of the present age. Though well trained in the study of the Greek dramatists nearly from our infant years, we still find ourselves more at home with the fays, fairies, and elves of Shakspeare, or the demonology of the German dramatists, than with the cunningly devised fables of the heroes and demigods of antiquity. A great deal of the enthusiasm which the ancient Greeks felt for their tragic drama, was owing to that sombre cast of mystery with which their religious sentiments veiled the inscrutable ordinations of Divine Providence. The Athenian breathed the atmosphere of inexplicable mystery when he sought to unravel the perplexities of the moral world, to which the broader light of revelation has given us the clue; and he resigned himself wholly to the thrilling awe which the master spirits of fiction infused into his breast when they dragged him, like an ox for the slaughter, through the interminable train of disasters which prostrated one wretched family after another to the unintelligible wrath of an infiexible Necessity. The Athenian exhibitions were religious spectacles; and the stage was the altar where their poets offered up the destinies of the human race as a sacrifice to the unerring shafts of an implacable fatality. Unless we could feel all the religious associations with which the Greek representations stood connected, we might in vain conjure up all the accessory enchantments of music and

scenery by which the attention of the Athenian was riveted in awful suspense to the terrific splendour of the moral action developed before him, and which continually accumulated in wo till it terminated in an overwhelming catastrophe. The Schlegels have done much to set the ancient drama in its right light, without attempting to intrench upon the just claims of the moderns. Like the Grecian and Gothic styles of architecture, the ancient and modern drama have very little in common, and do not admit of fair comparison. Each must be weighed in its own balance. Wherever the Grecian hero has left his tragic stilts to be tricked out in a Parisian costume, he has always betrayed his unnatural position, and ceased to attract the ordinary respect paid to the inflexible dignity of the antique.

We are altogether averse to the insane ravings of critics who have held up the Greek drama as a perfect model for imitation to all after aspirants to dramatic reputation. The great Shakspeare, the child of nature, has broken through all the unities of time and place; and while the Greeks have gone the round of their trilogies and tetralogies in the narrow compass of their theatrical kaleidoscope, the moderns have traversed the varied regions of the picturesque and romantic, and have created a unity of interest, where they could not cripple the wayward offspring of their imagination in the excruciating mould of the Greek critics.

Stripped of its primitive associations, the ancient tragedy descends to us in its naked simplicity, yet still to be admired for its graceful symmetry, though deprived of its original interest. The sublimity of Eschylus, the pathos of Sophocles, the sentimentalism of Euripides, may still call forth congenial emotions in the breasts of the moderns. Yet as dramas they are merely food for the closet of the critic, serve as an historical illustration of the genius and character of the people by whom they were invented, and add to the mass of exegetical apparatus by which the sense is determined of other productions which are more deserving our attention. The Greek tragic writers, especially Sophocles, may be made a good whetstone upon which to sharpen the critical acumen of the student in order to prepare him to exercise it on more serious and useful occasions. A stock of erudition derived from Attic sources may be frequently turned to account for the advantageous elucidation of many controverted passages of Holy Writ. The incidental diffi

culties of the Greek tragedians give opportunity to the student to pause and weigh the various bearings of mood and tense, of particles and participles, of prepositions in composition and out of composition, in order that he may bring into some intelligible connection the sense of the often short, elliptical and sententious dialogue of the speakers. Homer's Iliad and other books of simpler and more ready interpretation, are not of sufficient difficulty to arrest the student's attention to the structure and peculiarities of the Greek language. A translation of the tragedies of Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, demands precision of expression in order to fix with any definiteness the genuine meaning of the author. Much remains to be done by the Donnegans of the day to bring Anglo-Greek lexicography to complete accuracy. Greek dictionaries have not yet wholly cast off the sackcloth of their Latin obscurity.

Professor Stuart, of the College of South Carolina, has presented us with a handsome edition of the Edipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, illustrated with copious notes derived from a careful and judicious collation of European criticisms. We have examined diligently his notes, and can pronounce them to be, in general, perfectly orthodox. He, however, offers us nothing very new. He has not deviated much, if at all, from the track of his able guides; and his wisdom and modesty may be thus safely commended. In his stock of criticisms we recognise all the materiel with which we were regularly crammed some fifteen years ago, nearly word for word, before we were sent down to our beloved Alma Mater.

66

TOTE ex

As Mr. Stuart has entered upon a very close inspection of the Greek text, so as scarcely to have let a particle escape him without assigning it some meaning, we wish he had been more precise than he has been. We wish he had been more fixitior in his determination of those Protean atoms the Greek particles. Thus he says, v. 2, presses eagerness or impatience in interrogation;" but he does not give us the corresponding word in English or even Latin by which it is to be construed. Пore, we well knew, in an interrogation answers to the Latin tandem when in the same predicament, and is equivalent to the English pr'ythee, or I should like to know, or corresponds to the force of ever in such a phrase as this," What ever in the world do you mean?" 342, “obkov, still." The old meaning, wherefore, for this very reason, will do very well for this particle. The attention

66

απέρα

of the student might have here been directed to the accentual difference between ovkou, and oukov, 565, as guiding him to the difference of the sense. 289. Пára, like jamdudum, in this instance as in many others, does not signify long, but very much. 345. He does not "augment the force of in, but belongs to the word “ and has the sense of cunque in quæcunque, whatever. 769. Iov, If I mistake not, or perhaps. We are very glad to see Mr. Stuart pay so much attention to the signification of the Greek particles that are ambiguous; Kat does not escape his notice. Much remains to be done in this department of Greek criticism, now that the language is emancipated from the old method of interpreting it by the Latin. The English language affords abundance of particles sufficient to give to every Greek particle its precise meaning. Mr. Stuart's book would have been better, if he had adduced from his reading more passages in confirmation of his meanings, and thence have deduced some general expressions by which we could always grasp the sense of these so long fugitive expletives as they have been miscalled. Notes on the Plays in order to be useful ought to have a general bearing on the whole range of Greek criticism. They ought to take in the whole circle of Greek literature; and weapons be forged from them by which the student might be able to go forth, attack and dissipate every difficulty of construction elsewhere found. The Plays may be made famous text books on which to establish an inexhaustible repertory of philological knowledge.

We dislike to see critics calling in the aid of pleonasms and cases absolute and anaceleuthias to solve a grammatical difficulty, when the knot may be untied without having recourse to any such subterfuges. Thus Mr. Stuart says, 58, ΟΠ γνωτα κοὐκ αγνωτα μοι, "The same sense is here repeated by adjectives, one of which negatively expresses the sense of the other a common pleonasm, as often in the Iliad; e. g., κατ αισαν ουδ' υπεραισαν, and elsewhere.” Now the double negation in the first passage very elegantly strengthens the preceding affirmation; and the sense is, "known to me, and very well known to me." In the passage of the Iliad, the sense is, "according to justice and nothing more than justice." In 101 we are told that we have an accusative absolute, when we have nothing more than an ellipse of εστι Οι υπαρχει :

ως του αιμα (εστι) χείμαξον πολιν,