Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/339

 ON THE ROMAN THEATRE. 313 contrasted with a most heartfelt truth. Ever}^ common-place of Tragedy is worried out to the last gasp; all is phrase, among which even the simplest is forced and stilted. An utter poverty of mind is tricked out with wit and acuteness. They have fancy too, or at least a phantom of it ; of the abuse of that faculty, one may look to these plays for a speaking example. Their persons are neither ideal nor real men, but misshapen giants of puppets ; and the wire that sets them a-going is at one time an unnatiiral heroism, at another a passion alike unnatural, which no atrocity of guilt can appal. In a historj^, therefore, of Dramatic Art, I might have wholly passed by the Tra- gedies of Seneca, but that the blind j^rejudice in favour of all that remains to us from antiquity has attracted many imitators to these compositions. They were earlier and more generally known than the Greek Tragedies. Not merely scholai'S destitute of poetical taste have judged favourably of them, nay, have preferred them to the Greek Tragedies, but even poets have deemed them worth studying. The influence of Seneca on Comeille's notion of Tragedy is too plain to be over- looked ; Racine has deigned to borrow a good deal from him in his Phsedra (as may be seen in Bnunoy's eniuneration), and nearly the whole of the scene in which the heroine declares her passion. And here we close our disquisitions on the productions of Classical Antiquity.