Though it be dangerous to raise too great an expectation, especially in works of this nature, where we are to please an insatiable audience, yet it is reasonable to prepossess them in favour of an author; and therefore, both the prologue and epilogue informed you, that OEdipus was the most celebrated piece of all antiquity; that Sophocles, not only the greatest wit, but one of the greatest men in Athens, made it for the stage at the public cost; and that it had the reputation of being his masterpiece, not only among the seven of his which are still remaining, but of the greater number which are perished. Aristotle has more than once admired it, in his Book of Poetry; Horace has mentioned it: Lucullus, Julius Caesar, and other noble Romans, have written on the same subject, though their poems are wholly lost; but Seneca's is still preserved. In our own age, Corneille has attempted it, and, it appears by his preface, with great success. But a judicious reader will easily observe, how much the copy is inferior to the original. He tells you himself, that he owes a great part of his success, to the happy episode of Theseus and Dirce; which is the same thing, as if we should acknowledge, that we were indebted for our good fortune to the under-plot of Adrastus, Eurydice, and Creon. The truth is, he miserably failed in the character of his hero: If he desired that OEdipus should be pitied, he should have made him a better man. He forgot, that Sophocles had taken care to show him, in his first entrance, a just, a merciful, a successful, a religious prince, and, in short, a father of his country. Instead of these, he has drawn him suspicious, designing, more anxious of keeping the Theban crown, than solicitous for the safety of his people; hectored by Theseus, condemned by Dirce, and scarce maintaining a second part in his own tragedy. This was an error in the first concoction; and therefore never to be mended in the second or the third. He introduced a greater hero than OEdipus himself; for when Theseus was once there, that companion of Hercules must yield to none. The poet was obliged to furnish him with business, to make him an equipage suitable to his dignity; and, by following him too close, to lose his other king of Brentford in the crowd. Seneca, on the other side, as if there were no such thing as nature to be minded in a play, is always running after pompous expression, pointed sentences, and philosophical notions, more proper for the study than the stage: the Frenchman followed a wrong scent; and the Roman was absolutely at cold hunting. All we could gather out of Corneille was, that an episode must be, but not his way: and Seneca supplied us with no new hint, but only a relation which he makes of his Tiresias raising the ghost of Laius; which is here performed in view of the audience,--the rites and ceremonies, so far his, as he agreed with antiquity, and the religion of the Greeks. But he himself was beholden to Homer's Tiresias, in the