never have dreamt of surrounding Œdipus with such portents. But surely the latter remark demonstrates the unsoundness of the former. Has Mr. Hutton forgotten what is perhaps one of the sublimest scenes in any literature, the supernatural passing of this very deeply-dyed sinner Œdipus to his divine repose at Colonos, in the grove of those very ladies of divine vengeance, by whose awful ministry he had been at length assoiled of sin? the mysterious stairs; Antigone and Ismene expectant above; he “shading his eyes before a sight intolerable;” after drinking to the dregs the cup of sin and sorrow, rapt from the world, even he, to be tutelary deity of that land? Neither Elijah nor Moses was a sinless man; yet Moses, after enduring righteous punishment, was not, for God took him, and angels buried him; it was he who led Israel out of Egypt, communed with Jehovah on Sinai; he appeared with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. But I would suggest that the poet might have represented suffering and disappointment, not as penalty apportioned to particular transgressions, rather as integral elements in that mysterious destiny which determines the lot of man in his present condition of defect, moral, physical, and intellectual, involved in his “Hamartia,” or failure to realize that fulness of being which yet ideally belongs to him as divine. Both these ideas—the idea of Doom or destiny, and that of Nemesis on account of voluntary transgression—are alike present in due equipoise in the great conceptions of Greek drama, as Mr. J. A. Symonds has conclusively proved in his brilliant, philosophic and poetic work on the Greek poetry, against the more one-sided contention of Schlegel. I feel throughout Shakspeare this same idea of mystic inevitable destiny dominating the lives of men: you may call it, if you please, the will of God. Yet if it dooms us to error, ignorance, and crime, at all events this will cannot resemble the wills of men as they appear to us now. Othello expiates his foolish credulity, and jealous readiness to suspect her who had given him no cause to doubt her love. But there was the old fool Brabantio, and the devil Iago; there were his race, his temperament, his circumstances in general, and the circumstances of the hour,—all these were toils woven about him by Fate. Now, if the idea of Destiny be the more accentuated (and a tragedian surely should make us feel both this, and the free-will of man), then, as it seems to me, in the interests of Art, which loves life and harmony, not pure pain, loss, discord, or negation, there ought to be a purifying or idealizing process manifest in the ordeal to which the victims are subjected, if not for the protagonists, at all events for some of those concerned in the action. We must at least be permitted to behold the spectacle of constancy and fortitude, or devotion, as we do in Desdemona, Cordelia, Antigone, Iphigenia, Romeo and Juliet. But the ethical element of free-will is almost exclusively