dangerously morbid habits of soul. Thus we need some medicine for the soul against this danger, which may be to it what a purgative is to the body. Now it was a well-known fact, observed in connection with some of the more extravagant religious cults, that persons suffering from an excess of religious frenzy might be cured homoeopathically, so to say, by artificially arousing the very emotion in question by the use of exciting music. Aristotle extends the principle by suggesting that in the artificial excitement aroused by violently stimulating music or in the transports of sympathetic apprehension and pity with which we follow the disasters of the stage-hero, we have a safe and ready means of ridding ourselves of morbid emotional strain which might otherwise have worked havoc with the efficient conduct of real life. The great value of this defence of the occasional employment of sensation as a medicine for the soul is obvious. Unhappily it would seem to have so dominated Aristotle’s thought on the functions of dramatic art as to blind him to what we are accustomed to think the nobler functions of tragedy. No book has had a more curious fate than the little manual for intending composers of tragedies which is all that remains to us of Aristotle’s lectures on Poetry. This is not the place to tell the story of the way in which the great classical French playwrights, who hopelessly misunderstood the meaning of Aristotle’s chief special directions, but quite correctly divined that his lectures were meant to be an actual _Vade Mecum_ for the dramatist, deliberately constructed their masterpieces in absolute submission to regulations for which they had no better reasons than that they had once been given magisterially by an ancient Greek philosopher. But it may be worth while to remark that the worth of Aristotle’s account of tragedy as art-criticism has probably been vastly overrated. From first to last the standpoint he assumes, in his verdicts on the great tragic poets, is that of the gallery. What he insists on all through, probably because he has the purgative effect of the play always in his mind, is a well-woven plot with plenty of melodramatic surprise in the incidents and a thoroughly sensational culmination in a sense of unrelieved catastrophe over which the spectator can have a good cry, and so get well "purged" of his superfluous emotion. It is clear from his repeated allusions that the play he admired above all others was the _King Oedipus_ of Sophocles, but it is equally clear that he admired it not for the profound insight into human life and destiny or the deep sense of the mystery of things which some modern critics have found in it, but because its plot is the best and most startling detective story ever devised, and its finale a triumph of melodramatic horror. *BIBLIOGRAPHY*