Produced by Barbara Tozier, Nigel Blower, Bill Tozier and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net [Transcriber's Note: Typographical errors are listed at the end of the text. The printed book contained the six Numbers of Volume I with their appended plays. The Index originally appeared at the beginning of the volume; it has been included at the end of the journal text of Number 1 (Project Gutenberg EBook #22488), before the play. Pages 109-188 refer to the present Number.] THE MIRROR OF TASTE, AND DRAMATIC CENSOR. Vol. I. FEBRUARY 1810. No. 2. HISTORY OF THE STAGE. CHAPTER II. RISE AND PROGRESS OF THE DRAMA IN GREECE--ORIGIN OF TRAGEDY--THESPIS--AESCHYLUS, "THE FATHER OF THE TRAGIC ART"--HIS ASTONISHING TALENTS--HIS DEATH. It has been already remarked that at a very early period, considerably more than three thousand years ago, the Chinese and other nations in the east understood the rudiments of the dramatic art. In their crude, anomalous representations they introduced conjurers, slight of hand men and rope dancers, with dogs, birds, monkies, snakes and even mice which were trained to dance, and in their dancing to perform evolutions descriptive of mathematical and astronomical figures. To this day the vestiges of those heterogeneous amusements are discernible all over Indostan: but that which will be regarded by many with surprise, is that in all countries pagan or christian the drama in its origin, with the dancings and spectacles attending it have been intermixed with divine worship. The Bramins danced before their god Vishnou, and still hold it as an article of faith that Vishnou had himself, "in the olden time" danced on the head of a huge serpent whose tail encompassed the world. That very dance which we call a minuet, has been proved by an ingenious Frenchman, to be the same dance originally performed by the priests in the temple of Apollo, and constructed by them, to be symbolical of the zodiac; every figure described by the heavenly bodies having a correspondent movement in the minuet: the diagonal line and the two parallels representing the zodiac generally, the twelve steps of which it is composed, representing the twelve signs, and the twelve months of the year, and the bow at the beginning and the end of it a profound obedience to the sun. About the year four hundred after the building of the city of Rome, the Romans, then smarting under great public calamity, in order to appease the anger of heaven, instituted theatrical performances, as feasts in honour of their gods. The first Spanish plays were founded, sometimes on the loves of shepherds, but much more frequently on points of theology, such as the birth of Christ, the passion, the temptation in the desert and the martyrdom of saints. The most celebrated dramatic poet of Portugal, Balthazar, wrote dramas which he called AUTOS chiefly on pious subjects--and the prelate Trissino, the