conceive that any interloper into the Greek chorus must have danced when _they_ danced, or he would have been swept away by their impetus: _nolens volens_, he must have rode along with the orchestral charge, he must have rode on the crest of the choral billows, or he would have been rode down by their impassioned sweep. Samson, and Oedipus, and others, must have danced, if they sang; and they certainly _did_ sing, by notoriously intermingling in the choral business.[6] 'But now,' says the plain English reader, 'what was the object of all these elaborate devices? And how came it that the English tragedy, which surely is as good as the Greek,' (and at this point a devil of defiance whispers to him, like the quarrelsome servant of the Capulets or the Montagus, 'say _better_,') 'that the English tragedy contented itself with fewer of these artful resources than the Athenian?' I reply, that the object of all these things was--to unrealize the scene. The English drama, by its metrical dress, and by other arts more disguised, unrealized itself, liberated itself from the oppression of life in its ordinary standards, up to a certain height. Why it did not rise still higher, and why the Grecian _did_, I will endeavor to explain. It was not that the English tragedy was less impassioned; on the contrary, it was far more so; the Greek being awful rather than impassioned; but the passion of each is in a different key. It is not again that the Greek drama sought a lower object than the English: it sought a different object. It is not imparity, but disparity, that divides the two magnificent theatres. Suffer me, reader, at this point, to borrow from my-self, and do not betray me to the authorities that rule in this journal, if you happen to know [which is not likely] that I am taking an idea from a paper which years ago I wrote for an eminent literary journal. As I have no copy of that paper before me, it is impossible that I should save myself any labor of writing. The words at any rate I must invent afresh: and, as to the idea, you never _can_ be such a churlish man as, by insisting on a new one, in effect to insist upon my writing a false one. In the following paragraph, therefore, I give the substance of a thought suggested by myself some years ago.