besides the risk of offending great families, the Roman subjects were of too recent a date to have acquired that venerable cast, which the tragic muse demands, and time alone can bestow. They were not at sufficient distance to have dropped all those mean and disparaging circumstances, which unavoidably adhere to recent events, and in some measure sink the noblest modern transactions to the level of ordinary life. This seems to have been strongly felt by Sophocles and Euripides, who preferred the incidents connected with the sieges of Troy and of Thebes, rendered gigantic only by the mists of antiquity, to the real and almost living glories of Marathon or Thermopylæ. But the Romans had no families corresponding to the race of Atreus or Œdipus—they had no princess endowed with the beauty of Helen—no monarch invested with the dignity of Agamemnon—they had, in short, no epic cycle on which to form tragedies, like the Greeks, whose minds had been conciliated by Homer in favour of Ajax and Ulysses(352). “The most interesting subjects of tragedies,” says Adam Smith(353), “are the misfortunes of virtuous and magnanimous kings and princes;” but the Roman kings were a detested race, for whose rank and qualities there was no admiration, and for whose misfortunes there could be no sympathy. Accordingly, after some few and not very successful attempts to dramatize national incidents, the Latin tragic writers relapsed into their former practice, as appears from the titles of all the tragedies which were brought out from the time of Attius to that of Seneca. Hence it follows, that those remarks, which have been repeated to satiety with regard to the subjects of the Greek theatre, are likewise applicable to those of the Roman stage. There would be the same dignified misfortune displayed in nobler and imposing attitudes—the same observance of the unities—the same dramatic phrensy, remorse, and love, proceeding from the vengeance of the gods, and exhibited in the fate of Ajax, Orestes, and Phædra—the same struggle against that predominant destiny, which was exalted even above the gods of Olympus, and by which the ill-fated race of Atreus was agitated and pursued. The Latin, like the Greek tragedies, must have excited something of the same feeling as the Laocoon or Niobe in sculpture; and, indeed, the moral of a large proportion of them seems to be comprised in the chorus of Seneca’s _Œdipus_— “Fatis agimur—cedite fatis: Non solicitæ possunt curæ Mutare rati stamina fusi.”