boats against a superior force have given rise to a far larger literature than the great world-battles of Actium or Lepanto in the same seas. There was no Thucydides to write about these latter. As I think it easier to impress a modern audience with the importance of Greek prose style in this particular branch of its excellence, I shall put it in the foremost place. Nothing strikes a reader of the _Poetic_ of Aristotle (or of the treatise so called) as more incompetent than the illustration the writer uses to show that dramatic poetry is more philosophical than history. He says that the former portrays the general features of human character, as they must naturally develop, whereas history has no object but to narrate the details of what has happened, _e.g._ what Alcibiades did or suffered. I have already pointed out to you the astounding stupidity with which he has criticised the development of a noble tragic character by a great dramatist--the _Iphigenia in Aulis_ of Euripides. His notion of the portraiture of human nature as it ought to develop is one of commonplace consistency, excluding all those storms and passions which suddenly supervene and which give to human character all its interest and its variety. I have spoken to you of Aristotle’s judgments on tragic characters; but I am now concerned with his view of history, as a mere narrative of particulars, and I come to consider again his statement that Herodotus if put into metre would nevertheless be only history, and not dramatic poetry. It is a curious thing that we can here refute the critic from historical facts which he should have, nay must have, known. One episode in the history of Herodotus had already become a famous tragedy in the hands of Æschylus, whom we may fairly assert to be a very excellent judge of what was proper for a tragic subject. Another historic episode, the _Fall of Miletus_, was made the subject of a tragedy by Phrynichus, and if it displeased the Attic audience, who fined the poet, it was not because the subject was failing in tragic interest, but because it possessed too much, for it melted the whole audience into tears, and brought home to them their present misfortunes, as well as their recent blunders in policy, and their craven desertion of their kindred in Ionia.