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530 no man has power to pollute the gods. The calamity which now befalls him, is an appropriate chastisement. Already the event had proved his wisdom to be folly. The measures he had taken for the good of the state had involved it in distress and danger. His boasted firmness now gives way, and on a sudden he is ready to abandon his purpose, to revoke his decrees. But they are executed, in spite of himself, and in a manner which for ever destroys his own happiness. Antigone dies, the victim whom he had vowed to law and justice: but as in her he had sacrificed the domestic affections to his state-policy, her death deprives him of the last hope of his family, and makes his hearth desolate. She, on the other hand, who had been drawn into an involuntary conflict with social order by the simple impulse of discharging a private duty, pays indeed the price which, she had foreseen, her undertaking would cost: but she succeeds in her design, and triumphs over the power of Creon, who himself becomes the minister of her wishes.

The character and situation of the parties in this play rendered it almost necessary that the contest should be terminated by a tragical catastrophe, even if the poet had not been governed by the tradition on which his argument was founded: though to the last room is left open for a reconciliation which would have prevented the calamity. In the Philoctetes the struggle is brought to a happy issue, after all hopes of such a result appeared to have been extinguished: and this is not merely conformable to tradition, but required by the nature of the subject. Our present object is only to exhibit the works of Sophocles in a particular point of view, and we therefore abstain from entering into discussions, which, though very important for the full understanding of them, are foreign to our immediate purpose. We cannot however help observing, that the Philoctetes is a remarkable instance of the danger of trusting to a first impression in forming a judgement on the design of an ancient author: and that it ought at the same time to check the rashness of those who think that in such subjects all is to be discovered at the first glance, and to raise the confidence of those who may be apt to despair that study and investigation can ever ascertain anything in them, that has once been controverted. The Philoctetes