The life, essence, and characteristic qualities of the ancient Greek drama may be found in three things. First, in the ruling idea of Destiny or Fate. Secondly, in the Chorus. Thirdly, in Ideality. But in Euripides we behold only the decline and fall of that drama, and the three prevailing features we have mentioned are in him barely distinguishable, or to be seen only in their perversion. What, for example is, with Sophocles, and still more especially with Æschylus, the obscure and terrible spirit of predestination, sometimes mellowed down towards the catastrophe of their dramas into the unseen, yet not unfelt hand of a kind Providence, or overruling God, becomes in the handling of Euripides the mere blindness of accident, or the capriciousness of chance. He thus loses innumerable opportunities--opportunities which his great rivals have used to so good an effect--of giving a preternatural and ideal elevation to moral fortitude in the person of his heroes, by means of opposing them in a perpetual warfare with the arbitrations and terrors of Destiny. Again; the Chorus, which appears never to have been thoroughly understood by the moderns--the Chorus of Euripides is not, alas! the Chorus of his predecessors. That this singular, or at least apparently singular feature, in the Greek drama, was intended for the mere purpose of preventing the stage from being, at any moment entirely empty, has been an opinion very generally, and very unaccountably received. _The Chorus was not, at any time, upon the stage._ Its general station was in the orchestra, in which it also performed the solemn dances, and walked to and fro during the choral songs. And when it did not sing, its proper station was upon the _thymele_, an elevation somewhat like an altar, but with steps, in front of the orchestra, raised as high as the stage, and opposite to the scene--being also in the very centre of the entire theatre, and serving as a point around which the semi-circle of the amphitheatre was described. Most critics, however, have merely laughed at the Chorus as something superfluous and absurd, urging the folly of enacting passages supposed to be performed in secret in the presence of an assembled crowd, and believing that as it originated in the infancy of the art, it was continued merely through caprice or accident. Sophocles, however, wrote a treatise on the Chorus, and assigned his reasons for persisting in the practice. Aristotle says little about it, and that little affords no clew to its actual meaning or purpose. Horace considers it "a general expression of moral participation, instruction, and admonition;" and this opinion, which is evidently just, has been adopted and commented upon, at some length, by Schlegel. Publicity among the Greeks, with their republican habits and modes of thinking, was considered absolutely essential to all actions of dignity or importance. Their dramatic poetry imbibed the sentiment, and was thus made to display a spirit of conscious