The same is, I think, almost without exception the character of the relatively considerable number of observations of a critical kind which I have noted on other plays. Sometimes they are actual directions to the actor—who is told on _Electra_ 823 that he “ought, at the moment of uttering the cry, to look up to heaven, and raise his hands”—sometimes, as on _Œdipus Tyrannus_ 141, the note is made that “this will stir the theatre.” But always, I think,—certainly in the vast majority of cases,—the critic abstains, with a rigidity which can only come from deliberate purpose (and this is unlikely), or from unconsciousness that the thing is likely to be required of him, from any comments on the beauty or appropriateness of the verse, on the idiosyncrasy of the phrase or its agreement with others, on the Sophoclean characteristics of the poetry, or even (except from the pure stage point of view) on the evolution of the characters. He has evidently learnt his Aristotle, and looks at the action first: he has not learnt him with a sufficiently independent intelligence to remember that even Aristotle does not look at the action only. But the case becomes strongest when we come to what should be the stronghold of literary criticism in this quarter—the [Sidenote: _On Homer._] Scholia[83] on Homer himself. Here we have the thrice—nay, thirty times—decocted essence of the critical study of generations, centuries, almost millennia (certainly more than one millennium), of study of the writer who entered into Greek life, Greek thought, Greek education, as no book, save the English Bible, has ever entered into the life, the thought, the education, of any other country. We have it in ample bulk, of all ages, presented in that special fashion of comment on comment, of annotated annotation, which, whatever may be its merits or whatever may be its drawbacks, is at any rate suited to draw out examination of the common subject from almost every point of view. Footnote 83: Ed. Dindorf and Maass. Oxford, 6 vols., 1855-88.