the questions of Original Sin, or of Innate Ideas, than those of Classic and Romantic, it may astonish us that age after age should busy itself unweariedly with the discussion of Homer’s moral or immoral purpose in depicting the scenes between Helen, Paris, and Aphrodite, between Zeus and Hera with the cestus, instead of dilating upon the character-force of the first scene and the voluptuous beauty of the second. But if we realise the motives which actuated them, we shall be less surprised to find so little literary criticism of Homer. Footnote 275: Probably the very temperament, which spurs the critic on to his business, afflicts him with this thorn in the flesh. I should not be surprised if examples of it were found in the present volume. But it has been kept down as far as possible. We have far more in regard to the Tragedians, and for obvious reasons: indeed we have more strictly literary criticism in regard to the drama than to any other division of Greek literary art. The estimates of the Three in general seem to have been not very different from what we should expect, but still somewhat different. The magnificence of Æschylus struck the scrupulous Greek taste as too often approaching bombast, and we look with surprised disappointment for so much as a single appreciation of his unequalled choruses (that of Dion, noted above, is slight and little to the point). With the Greek public generally Euripides seems, on the whole, and putting different times together, to have been the favourite of the three, and if the critics were less favourable to him, it was rather for extra-literary than for literary reasons. Public and critics together seem to have felt for Sophocles that special esteem, as distinguished, perhaps, from actual enthusiasm, which has descended to us moderns as a sort of venerable convention—to be acquiesced in even when we do not actively share it, and to be transformed occasionally into vehement championship. Only from Longinus do we learn that Sophocles was considered to be far from impeccable, but to atone for his faults by his beauties: and Longinus himself, unfortunately, does not tell us what the faults were.