The interval between 776-560 B. C. presents to us a remarkable expansion of Grecian genius in the creation of their elegiac, iambic, lyric, choric, and gnomic poetry, which was diversified in a great many ways and improved by many separate masters. The creators of all these different styles—from Kallinus and Archilochus down to Stesichorus—fall within the two centuries here included; though Pindar and Simonidês, “the proud and high-crested bards,”[143] who carried lyric and choric poetry to the maximum of elaboration consistent with full poetical effect, lived in the succeeding century, and were contemporary with the tragedian Æschylus. The Grecian drama, comic as well as tragic, of the fifth century B. C., combined the lyric and choric song with the living action of iambic dialogue,—thus constituting the last ascending movement in the poetical genius of the race. Reserving this for a future time, and for the history of Athens, to which it more particularly belongs, I now propose to speak only of the poetical movement of the two earlier centuries, wherein Athens had little or no part. So scanty are the remnants, unfortunately, of these earlier poets, that we can offer little except criticisms borrowed at second-hand, and a few general considerations on their workings and tendency.[144] [143] Himerius, Orat. iii, p. 426, Wernsdorf—ἀγέρωχοι καὶ ὑψαυχένες. [144] For the whole subject of this chapter, the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth chapters of O. Müller’s History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, wherein the lyric poets are handled with greater length than consists with the limits of this work, will be found highly valuable,—chapters abounding in erudition and ingenuity, but not always within the limits of the evidence. The learned work of Ulrici (Geschichte der Griechischen Poesie—_Lyrik_) is still more open to the same remark.