If we carry ourselves in imagination back to a time when dramatic composition was unknown, we must acknowledge that its creation required great boldness of mind. Hitherto the bard had only sung of gods and heroes; it was, therefore, a great change for the poet himself to come forward all at once in the character of the god or hero, in a nation which, even in its amusements, had always adhered closely to established usages. It is true that there is much in human nature which impels it to dramatic representations, such as the universal love of imitating other persons, and the child-like liveliness with which a narrator, strongly impressed with his subject, delivers a speech which he has heard or perhaps only imagined. Yet there is a wide step from these disjointed elements to the genuine drama, and it seems that no nation, except the Greeks, ever made this step. The dramatic poetry of the Hindus belongs to a time when there had been much intercourse between Greece and India; even in ancient Greece and Italy, dramatic poetry, and especially tragedy, attained to perfection only in Athens, and here it was exhibited only at a few festivals of a single god, Dionysus, while epic rhapsodies and lyric odes were recited on various occasions. All this is incomprehensible, if we suppose dramatic poetry to have originated in causes independent of the peculiar circumstances of time and place. If a love of imitation and a delight in disguising the real person under a mask were the basis upon which this style of poetry was raised, the drama would have been as natural and as universal among men as these qualities are common to their nature.