there is little trace of any sense of the relation of the individual to a Divine power; and there are some indications not only of a scorn for common superstition, but also of disbelief in the foundations of personal religion. The thought of the insecurity of life, of the vicissitudes of human affairs, and of the impotence of man to control his fate, which forced the Greek poets and historians of the fifth century B.C. into deeper speculations on the question of Divine Providence, was utterly alien to the natural temperament of Rome, and to the confidence inspired by uniform success during the long period succeeding the Second Punic War. The contemplative and religious thought of Greek tragedy was thus as remote from the practical spirit of the Romans as the political license and the personal humours of the old Athenian comedy were from the earnestness of public life and the dignity of government in the great aristocratic Republic. And thus it happened that, as the comic poets of Rome reproduced the new comedy of Athens, which portrayed the passions of private not of political life, and the manners rather of a cosmopolitan than of a purely Greek civilisation, so the tragic poets found the art of Euripides and of his less illustrious successors more easy to imitate than that of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The interest of tragedy, as treated by Euripides, turns upon the catastrophes produced by human passion: the religious meaning has, in a great measure, passed out of it; the characters have dwindled from their heroic stature to the proportions of ordinary life; his thought is the result of the analysis of motives, and the study of familiar experience. He has more affinity with the ordinary thoughts and moods of men than either of the older poets. The older and the later Greek writers have a nearer relation to the spirit of other eras of the world's history than those who represent Athenian civilisation in its maturity. It requires a longer familiarity with the mind and heart of antiquity to realise and enjoy the full meaning of Sophocles, Thucydides, or Aristophanes, than of Homer, Euripides, or Theocritus. Homer is indeed one of the truest, if not the truest, representative of the genius of Greece,--the representative also of the ancient world in the same sense as Shakspeare is of the modern world,--but he is, at the same time, directly intelligible and interesting to all countries and times from his being the most natural and powerful exponent of the elementary feelings and forces of human nature. The later poets, on the other hand, such as Euripides and the writers of the new comedy, were not indeed more truly human, but were less distinctively Greek than their immediate predecessors. They had advanced beyond them in the analytic knowledge of human nature; but, with the decay of religious belief and political feeling, they had lost much of the genius and sentiment by which the old Athenian life was characterised.