Another good aspect of the drama in Greece is that it came in the period of the full-flowering of Greek egotism, or if the phrase is happier, of Greek patriotism. Here, too, we may find an analogy in the England of Shakspere. The age of Elizabeth is easily fixed upon as that of self-satisfied British patriotism. It is also true that alike in the Athens of the dramatists and the London of Shakspere there was the stir and bustle and heroic energy of national life. It is not to be overlooked that the dramatists of Greece, like the literary statesmen of England were in public life. They sought and held office; and, indeed, they, like Socrates, were soldiers besides. Æschylus fought at Marathon, Salamis, and Platæa, the three great battles of his country. Shakspere did not do his work on the Avon, but in the din of London, and many a thing which surprises us in his plays may be explained by the close and uninterrupted contact of the dramatist with the active men of his time. He learned, for example, all his law phrases in convivial association with lawyers, much as he learned scripture by hearing the prayer-book read in the churches. (He always quotes the prayer-book, never the Bible.) So in Athens, our statesmen-dramatists lived in the full press of life, and their drama reflects the opinions and proverbs of their day. Men of the lamp could not have caught the spirit and attitude of the Athenian mind toward the problems of life which underlie the Greek plays. The just-enough and not too much or too little of philosophy—the mean between dogmatic theology and crude irreligion—the man of the world, and he alone, can hit. We may safely reason that while many forms of literature can be best wrought by men out of the world, some forms seem to require their producers to be in the world and of the world; and among these, the drama is especially reserved to men who combine practical experience with erudition, and also possess the indescribable mystery of genius. The student will be well repaid for his pains who struggles to understand the spirit—a strange one to us—which is peculiar to the Greek drama, the singular aspects and functions of religion, and the mode in which it is apparently held fast by the tragic poet, who is also a man of the world. There are also profitable studies to be made of those glimpses of unchanging human nature which the tragedies afford us. One theory is that we study old classics in order to know an older and extinct type of mankind: a truer view is that the virtues and vices of the elder man are simple and undisguised by social varnish. In any case, the student who understands, for example, the woman Medea, has a useful lesson in “the proper study of mankind.” CHAUTAUQUA AT NEW ORLEANS.