which may shock a Voltaire or a Schlegel, but which impress an English critic with a sense of the power and the love of human nature shown in our best tragedies. It is indeed here that the French school, with great propriety, point out the analogies between the Greek and the wholly independent English drama, as opposed to the professed imitations of the courtly French poets. But at present I wish merely to call attention to the idyllic tone we catch at stray moments in Euripides—a tone which enriches the brilliant descriptions in the Bacchæ and the Ion, and strikes us even more directly in the opening chorus of the Cyclops—truly the most Theocritean passages in older Greek poetry,[1] which show how even the still undiscovered or little heeded loveliness of the world's quieter aspects found a place in this cor cordium of antiquity.
- ↑ I know of nothing else that can be cited as a parallel except the very little known and most picturesque Hymn to Pan, among the Homeric hymns.
