is with literary excursions. We must be acclimatized in the new country before we can feel comfortable. We must not merely deliver our criticism thus (however common such a style may be)--_I expected to find that; I find this; and I am disappointed;_ but we must ask the deeper and the only valuable question--_What ought I to have expected to find, what shall I surely find of good, and beautiful, and true, if my eyes are open, and my free glance pointed in the right direction?_ In short, if a man will enjoy and judge a Greek "tragedy," he must seek to know not what it is in reference to the general idea of tragedy which he brings with him from modern theatrical exhibitions, but what it was to the ancient Greeks, sitting in the open air, on their wooden bench, or on their seat hewn from the native rock, with the merry Bacchic echoes in their ears, long before Aristotle laid down those nice rules of tragic composition which only Shakespere might dare to despise. Let us inquire, therefore, setting aside alike Shaksperian examples and Aristotelian canons, what the τραγῳδία, or "tragedy," was to the ancient Greeks. Nor have we far to seek. The name, when the modern paint is rubbed off, declares its own history; and we find that the main idea of the old word τραγῳδία--as, by the way, the _only_ idea of the modern word τραγουδι[f1]--is A SONG. Of the second part of this word, we have preserved the root in our English words _ode_, _melody_, _monody_, _threnody_, and the other half of the word means _goat_; whether that descriptive addition to the principal substantive came from the circumstance that the song was originally sung by persons habited like goats,[f2] or from other circumstances connected with the worship of Dionysus, to whom this animal was sacred, is of no importance for our present purpose. The main fact to which we have to direct attention, is that the word _tragedy_, when analysed, bears upon its face, and in the living Greek tongue proclaims loudly to the present hour, that the essential character of this species of poetry--when the name was originally given to it--was lyrical, and {13} not at all dramatic or tragic, in the modern sense of these words. A drama, in modern language, means an action represented by acting persons; and a tragedy is such a represented action, having a sad issue; but neither of these elements belonged to the original Greek tragedy, as inherited from his rude predecessors by Æschylus, nor (as we shall immediately show) do they form the prominent or characteristic part of that exhibition, as transmitted by him to his successors. With regard to the origin of the Greek "goat-song," and its condition previous to the age of Æschylus, there is but one uncontradicted voice of tradition on the subject; the curious discussions and investigations of the learned affecting only certain minute points of detail in the progress, which have no interest for the general student. That tradition is to the effect that the Greek