Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/172

 Kennaston had come to think artistic creation in words—since marble and canvas inevitably perished—was the one, possibly, worth-while employment of human life. But here was a crude corporal deed which bluntly destroyed thoughts, and annihilated dreams by wholesale. To Kennaston this seemed the one real tragedy that could be staged on earth

Curious, very curious, it was to Kennaston, to see the burning of sixty-three plays written by Æschylus, of a hundred and six by Sophocles, and of fifty-five by Euripides—masterworks eternally lost, which, as Kennaston knew, the world would affect to deplore eternally, whatever might be the world's real opinion in the matter.

But of these verbal artificers something at least was to endure. They would fare better than Agathon and Ion and Achæus, their admitted equals in splendor, whose whole life-work was passing, at the feet of Horvendile, into complete oblivion. There, too, were perishing all the writings of the Pleiad—the noble tragedies of Homerus, and Sositheus, and Lycophron, and Alex