spectator's emotions, the paucity of actors present on the stage at any moment, the curious imitation, to be seen also in _Comus_, of the Greek _stichomuthia_, in which a verbal passage of arms is conducted on the principle of giving each speaker one line for his attack or retort. There are, indeed, some fundamental differences. They are important enough to have led so great a critic as Professor Jebb to argue that Milton's drama is too Hebrew to be Hellenic at all. His point is that Greek tragedy aims at producing an imaginative pleasure by arousing a "sense, on the one hand, of the heroic in man; on the other hand, of a superhuman controlling power"; and he asserts that this is not the method adopted by Milton in _Samson_. Samson is throughout a free man; his misfortunes are the fruit of his own folly. God is still on his side and his death is a patriotic triumph, not, like the death of Heracles, who resembles him in so many ways, merely the final proof of the all-powerful malignity of fate. No one will venture to differ from Jebb on such a question without a sense of great temerity. But perhaps the truth is that one who had lived all his life, as Jebb had, in the closest intimacy with the Greek drama, would be apt to feel small differences from {243} it too much and broad resemblances too little. To the shepherd all his sheep differ from each other: the danger for him is to forget, what the ignorant stranger sees, that they are also all very much alike. So Jebb is no doubt perfectly right in the distinction he makes: but he is surely blinded by his own knowledge when he argues from it that _Samson Agonistes_ "is a great poem and a noble drama; but neither as poem nor as drama is it Hellenic." Of that question comparative ignorance is perhaps a better judge. For it can still see that the broad division which separates the world's drama into two kinds is a real thing, and that Milton's drama belongs in spite of differences unquestionably to the Greek kind and not to the other, both by its method and by its spirit. There can be no real doubt that it is far more like the _Prometheus_ or the _Oedipus_ than it is like _Hamlet_ or _All for Love_. Probably no great tragedy of any sort can be made without that sense of the contrast between man's will and the "superhuman controlling power" of which Jebb speaks as peculiarly Greek. Certainly it is present in the greatest of Shakspeare's tragedies, and not seldom finds open expression. "There's a divinity that shapes our ends." {244}