Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/23



T has fared with the greatest dramatic poet of Greece as with the greatest dramatic poet of England. In both cases the task of writing a biography is almost like that of making bricks without straw. In the case of our own Shakespeare, we have to rest content with leaving much of the outward, and nearly the whole of the inward life, as geographers leave a region untravelled and unsurveyed. Gaps remain, which no elaborate industry, no lynx-eyed acuteness, enable us to fill up. It is hardly otherwise with the life of Sophocles. We ask for sources, and we find that our nearest approach to them is to be sought in the second-hand memoir of an unknown Scholiast of uncertain date, in the short notices of a lexicographer, in a few anecdotes, more or less trustworthy,