It boldly appears in all its dulness in the criticisms which Dr. Samuel Johnson made on particular plays of Shakespeare, for he very naïvely laments its entire absence. And its absence is certainly obvious, for in what has Ophelia, Desdemona, or Cordelia offended? But only the dull, optimistic, Protestant-rationalistic, or peculiarly Jewish view of life will make the demand for poetical justice, and find satisfaction in it. The true sense of tragedy is the deeper insight, that it is not his own individual sins that the hero atones for, but original sin, _i.e._, the crime of existence itself: “Pues el delito mayor Del hombre es haber nacido;” (“For the greatest crime of man Is that he was born;”) as Calderon exactly expresses it. I shall allow myself only one remark, more closely concerning the treatment of tragedy. The representation of a great misfortune is alone essential to tragedy. But the many different ways in which this is introduced by the poet may be brought under three specific conceptions. It may happen by means of a character of extraordinary wickedness, touching the utmost limits of possibility, who becomes the author of the misfortune; examples of this kind are Richard III., Iago in “Othello,” Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice,” Franz Moor, Phædra of Euripides, Creon in the “Antigone,” &c., &c. Secondly, it may happen through blind fate, _i.e._, chance and error; a true pattern of this kind is the Œdipus Rex of Sophocles, the “Trachiniæ” also; and in general most of the tragedies of the ancients belong to this class. Among modern tragedies, “Romeo and Juliet,” “Tancred” by Voltaire, and “The Bride of Messina,” are examples. Lastly, the misfortune may be brought about by the mere position of the _dramatis personæ_ with regard to each other, through their relations; so that there is no need either for a tremendous error or an unheard-of accident, nor yet for a character whose wickedness reaches the limits of human possibility; but characters of ordinary morality, under circumstances such as often occur, are so situated with regard to each other that their position compels them, knowingly and with their eyes open, to do each other the greatest injury, without any one of them being entirely in the wrong. This last kind of tragedy seems to me far to surpass the other two, for it shows us the greatest misfortune, not as an exception, not as something occasioned by rare circumstances or monstrous characters, but as arising easily and of itself out of the actions and characters of men, indeed almost as essential to them, and thus brings it terribly near to us. In the other two kinds we may look on the prodigious fate and the horrible wickedness as terrible powers which certainly threaten us, but only from afar, which we may very well escape without taking refuge in renunciation. But in the last kind of tragedy we see that those powers which destroy happiness and life are such that their path to