As the Italian talent for impromptu buffoonery might perhaps have in time created a genuine native comedy, so the powerful and earnest rhetoric in which the deeper feelings of the Roman always found expression, might have assumed the tragic garb and woven itself into happy and original alliance with the dramatic instinct. But what actually happened was different. Tragedy, as well as comedy, took its subjects from the Greek; but though comedy had the advantage of a far greater popularity, and also of a partially native origin, there is reason to believe that tragedy came the nearer of the two to a really national form of art. In the fullest and noblest sense of the word Rome had indeed no national drama; for a drama, to be truly representative, must be based on the deepest chords of patriotic and even religious feeling. And that golden age of a people's history when Patriotism and Religion are still wedded together, seeming but varying reflections from the mirror of national life, is the most favourable of all to the birth of dramatic art. In Greece this was pre- eminently the case. The spirit of patriotism is ever present--rarely, indeed, suggesting, as in the _Persae_ of Aeschylus, the subject of the play, but always supplying a rich background of common sympathy where poet and people can feel and rejoice together. Still more, if possible, is the religious spirit present, as the animating influence which gives the drama its interest and its vitality. The great moral and spiritual questions which occupy the soul of man, in each play or series of plays, try to work out their own solution by the natural human action of the characters, and by those reflections on the part of the chorus to which the action naturally gives rise. But with the transplanted tragedy of the Romans this could no longer be the case. The religious ideas which spoke straight to the Athenian's heart, spoke only to the acquired learning of the Roman. The idea of man, himself free, struggling with a destiny which he could not comprehend or avert, is foreign to the Roman conception of life. As Schlegel has observed, a truly Roman tragic drama would have found an altogether different basis. The binding force of "Religio," constraining the individual to surrender himself for the good of the Supreme State, and realising itself in acts of patriotic self-devotion; such would have been the shape we should have expected Roman tragedy to take, and if it failed to do this, we should not expect it in other respects to be a great success.