Produced by Louise Hope, Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net [Transcriber’s Note: This e-text includes characters that will only display in UTF-8 (Unicode) file encoding, including œ (“oe” ligature) and one or two Greek words. If the apostrophes and quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, make sure your text reader’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change the default font. As a last resort, use the latin-1 version of the file instead. 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 added to the end of the journal text, before the play. Pages 189-268 refer to the present Number. Errors are listed separately for the _Mirror of Taste_ and for the _Novice of St. Mark’s_.] THE MIRROR OF TASTE, AND DRAMATIC CENSOR. Vol. I. MARCH 1810. No. 3. HISTORY OF THE STAGE. CHAPTER III. SOPHOCLES--EURIPIDES--DIONYSIUS. ÆSCHYLUS and SHAKSPEARE have each been styled the father of the drama of his country: yet their claims to this distinction stand on very different grounds. Æschylus laid the plan and foundation of the Grecian tragedy and built upon it; but to his successor belongs the glory of improving upon his invention. Shakspeare raised the drama of his country at once to the utmost degree of perfection: succeeding poets have been able to do nothing more than walk in the path trod by him, at an immense distance, and endeavour to copy but without equalling his perfections. The general admiration in which Æschylus was held, gave birth to a herd of imitators, among whom were sons and nephews of his own; but as, like most imitators, they could do little more than mimic his defects without reaching his excellencies, they served only as a foil to set off the lustre of his great successor Sophocles, who, while yet his scholar, aspired to be his competitor, and gained the preeminence at the age of twenty-five.