[9] _Whose_ version, I do not know. But one unaccountable error was forced on one's notice. _Thebes_, which, by Milton and by every scholar is made a monosyllable, is here made a dissyllable. But _Thebez_, the dissyllable, is a _Syrian_ city. It is true that Causabon deduces from a Syriac word meaning a case or enclosure (a _theca_), the name of Thebes, whether Boeotian or Egyptian. It is probable, therefore, that Thebes the hundred-gated of Upper Egypt, Thebes the seven-gated of Greece, and Thebes of Syria, had all one origin as regards the name. But this matters not; it is the _English_ name that we are concerned with. [10] '_False_:' or rather inaccurate. The burlesque was not on the Antigone, but on the Medea of Euripides; and very amusing. [11] But in this instance, perhaps, distance of space, combined with the unrivalled grandeur of the war, was felt to equiponderate the distance of time, Susa, the Persian capital, being fourteen hundred miles from Athens. [12] _[Greek: Sterna th'os agalmatos], her bosom as the bosom of a statue_; an expression of Euripides, and applied, I think, to Polyxena at the moment of her sacrifice on the tomb of Achilles, as the bride that was being married to him at the moment of his death. [13] Amongst the questions which occurred to me as requiring an answer, in connection with this revival, was one with regard to the comparative fitness of the Antigone for giving a representative idea of the Greek stage. I am of opinion that it was the worst choice which could have been made; and for the very reason which no doubt governed that choice, viz.-- because the austerity of the tragic passion is disfigured by a love episode. Rousseau in his letter to D'Alembert upon his article _Geneve_, in the French Encyclopedie, asks,--'_Qui est-ce qui doute que, sur nos theatres, la meilleure piece de Sophocle ne tombat tout-a-plat?_' And his reason (as collected from other passages) is--because an interest derived from the passion of sexual love can rarely be found on the Greek stage, and yet cannot be dispensed with on that of Paris. But why was it so rare on the Greek stage? Not from accident, but because it did not harmonize with the principle of that stage, and its vast overhanging gloom. It is the great infirmity of the French, and connected constitutionally with the gayety of their temperament, that they cannot sympathize with this terrific mode of grandeur. We can. And for _us_ the choice should have been more purely and severely Grecian; whilst the slenderness of the plot in any Greek tragedy, would require a far more effective support from tumultuous movement in the chorus. Even the French are not uniformly insensible to this Grecian grandeur. I remember that Voltaire, amongst many just remarks on the Electra of Sophocles, mixed with others that are _not_ just, bitterly condemns this demand for a love fable on the French stage, and illustrates its extravagance by the French tragedy on the same