The ancient tragedy, from its very nature, contains the concentration of high passion. This was the very notion of it, as tragedy. And this quality renders it an indispensable study to all those whose province it is to scrutinize or to awaken the active powers; in other words, to the metaphysician, the poet, and especially the orator. No doubt it was this view of the subject which led a man no less visionary than Mr. Fox to declare, as he does in his correspondence with Dr. Parr, that if he had a son to educate for the senate, he would cause him to be profoundly versed in the writings of Euripides.[1] And yet so far as mere passion is concerned, we find it more strongly developed in the “desolate simplicity” of Aeschylus, than in either of his followers. This use of dramatic composition is doubtless involved in that celebrated and vexed passage of Aristotle's Poetics, in which tragedy is said to be efficacious to _purge the passions_. Barker quotes Jamblichus, in illustration of this _παθηματων καθαρσις_, where he says: “By contemplating the passions of others in tragedy and comedy, we settle our own passions, render them more temperate, and purify them.” Milton also, whose whole soul was steeped in Grecian poesy, alludes in the introduction to his Samson Agonistes, to this same remark of Aristotle, where tragedy is said “to be of power by raising pity and fear or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions, that is, to temper and reduce them to just measure.” [Footnote 1: See Appendix to Parr's Works, Johnstone's edition. Vol. vii. and viii.] Alike in name, ancient and modern tragedy scarcely belong to the same species. The grand distinction of the former is the chorus, which is altogether inadmissible in the latter. According to the most specious hypothesis this was the nucleus of the Greek drama, around which, by slow degrees, the dialogue was gathered. It was the chorus, as a train of personages unconnected with the plot, that relieved the tedium or directed the excitement of the dialogue. Sometimes, as they appear in significant dance, they advise, exhort, or suggest a moral; sometimes they echo back the feeling of the actors, and always augment the grandeur of the pageant. Thus we find the chorus ever and anon breaking in to temper the unnatural rage of Medea, and in this respect discharging the duty indicated by Horace, Ille bonis faveat, et concilietur amice: Et regat iratos, et amet pacare tumentes: Ille dapes laudet mensac brevis: ille salubrem Justitiam, legesque, et apertis otia portis: Ille tegat commissa, &c. _Ad Pisones_ 195.