were so far greater than his material resources, his habit of mind so far in advance of the world that surrounded him. We seem in ancient Greece to be moving in a region that is next door to savagery, and in the midst of it to have speech with men whom we might gladly accept as our leaders or advisers if they lived now. Meantime there are screens between us and these men; the screens of a foreign language, a strange form of life, different conventions in art. It is these last that we must now deal with, for we shall find it hard ever to understand Greek tragedy if we expect from it exactly what we expect from a modern or Elizabethan play. One would have to make no such preface if we were dealing with the form of Greek Drama that immediately succeeded the great age of Tragedy. There arose in the fourth century, B.C., a kind of play that we could understand at once, the so-called New Comedy of Menander and Philemon. New Comedy is neither tragic nor comic, but, like our own plays, a discreet mixture of both. It has no austere religious atmosphere. Its interest--like ours--is in love and adventure and intrigue. It has turned aside from legend and legendary Kings and Queens, and operates, as we do, with a boldly invented plot and fictitious characters, drawn mostly from everyday life. The New Comedy dominated the later Attic stage and called into life the Roman. It was highly praised and immensely popular. It was so easy in its flow and it demanded so little effort. Yet, significantly enough, it has passed away without leaving a single complete specimen of its work in existence. When after ages were exerting themselves to save from antiquity just that minimum of most precious things that must not be allowed to die, it was the greater and more difficult form of drama that they preserved. Let us try to see and to surmount the difficulties. Every form of art has its conventions. Think, for instance, of the conventions of modern Opera. Looked at in cold blood, from outside the illusion, few forms of art could be more absurd, yet, I suppose, the emotional and artistic effect of a great opera is extraordinarily high. The analogy may help us in the understanding of Greek tragedy.