Sophocles, and Euripides. The community which Athenian drama addressed was precisely in the mood which best enables a dramatist to exert political and moral force. There was much in its temper that might remind us of Elizabethan England; but I would venture to illustrate it here by words borrowed from the England of a later time. The greatest plea in the English language for the liberty of the press—or perhaps we should rather say, for the freedom of the mind—belongs to the close of that year which saw the hopes of the Parliamentarians, in their struggle with the Royalists, raised to an assurance of final success by the crushing defeat of Rupert. An enthusiastic confidence in the large destinies opening before the English people already fired the mind of the poet who was to end his days, like Samson “Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves, Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke.” Then, in 1644, Milton, thinking of the victory of Marston Moor, was rather like Aeschylus raising his dramatic paean for the victory of Salamis; and the glowing language in which he describes the new alertness of his country’s spirit might fitly be applied to the Athens for which the great dramatists wrote. “As in a body, when the blood is fresh, the spirits pure and vigorous not only to vital but to rational faculties and those in the acutest and the pertest operations of wit and suttlety, it argues in what good plight and constitution the body is, so when the cherfulnesse of the people is so sprightly up, as that it has not only wherewith to guard well its own freedom and safety but to spare, and to bestow upon the solidest and sublimest points of controversie and new invention, it betok’ns us not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatall decay, but casting off the old and wrincl’d skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and wax young again, entring the glorious waies of Truth and prosperous vertue destin’d to become great and honourable in these latter ages. Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an Eagle muing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazl’d eyes as the full mid-day beam, purging and unscaling her long abused sight at the fountain it self of heav’nly radiance.”