but the "Delicta majorum immeritus lues" of the same poet remains a fearful reality in the daily administration of the world, which no serious-thinking man can afford to disregard. In the ancient law of Moses, as in the most famous systems of Christian theology, this principle plays a prominent part; and awful as its operation is, often sweeping whole generations into ruin, and smiting whole nations with a chronic leprosy, for the folly or extravagance of an ephemeral individual, we shall not be surprised to find it equally conspicuous in the literature of so subtle a people as the Greeks. The Hellenic mind, no doubt, was too sunny and too healthy to allow itself to be encased and imprisoned with this idea, as with an iron mail; but as a mysterious dark background of moral existence it was recognised in its highest power; and nowhere so distinctly, and with such terrible iteration, as in those lyrical exhibitions of solemn, religious, and legendary faith, which we call tragedy. {258} Among the other serious ethico-religious legends with which the scanty remains of the rich Greek tragedy have made us more familiar, the dark fates of two famous families--the Pelopidae and the Labdacidae--force themselves upon our attention with a marked distinctness. How the evil genius (ἀλάστωρ) of inherited guilt revealed itself in the blood-stained track of the descendants of Tantalus we have seen on the large scale of a complete trilogy; the play to which we now introduce the reader is an exhibition of the same stern law of moral concatenation, in one of the scenes of the dark story of the Theban family of the Labdacidae. Labdacus, the father of this unfortunate race, is traced back in the legendary genealogy to the famous Phœnician settler, Cadmus, being removed from him by only one generation.[f1] This head of the family appears tainted with no moral guilt of an extraordinary kind; but his son Laius figures in the legend, not like Pelops in the Pelopidan story, as a murderer, but as a licentious and a lustful character. Yielding to the violent impulses of unnatural passion,[f2] he is said to have carried off from Elis, Chrysippus, the son of Pelops; whereupon the injured father pronounced against the unholy ravisher the appropriate curse that he should die childless, or, if he did beget children, that himself should lose his life by the hands of those to whom he had been the means of giving it. We see here exemplified that grand principle of retaliation (_lex talionis_), "_An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth_," which stands out so prominently in the laws of Moses, and is so agreeable to the moral instincts of the human heart. Laius was to perish by his own progeny, because, in the irregular gratification of the procreative instinct, he had sinned against Nature. The curse spoken against him by Pelops was the wrathful expression of one of Nature's greatest laws; in whatever way we seek violently to obtain happiness contrary