of the drama. Thus, when we speak of Athenian poetry, we speak of
dramatic poetry--they were one and the same. As Helvetius has so
luminously shown [332], genius ever turns towards that quarter in
which fame shines brightest, and hence, in every age, there will be a
sympathetic connexion between the taste of the public and the
direction of the talent.

Now in Athens, where audiences were numerous and readers few, every
man who felt within himself the inspiration of the poet would
necessarily desire to see his poetry put into action--assisted with
all the pomp of spectacle and music, hallowed by the solemnity of a
religious festival, and breathed by artists elaborately trained to
heighten the eloquence of words into the reverent ear of assembled
Greece.

Hence the multitude of dramatic poets, hence the mighty fertility of
each; hence the life and activity of this--the comparative torpor and
barrenness of every other--species of poetry. To add to the
pre-eminence of the art, the applauses of the many were sanctioned by
the critical canons of the few. The drama was not only the most
alluring form which the Divine Spirit could assume--but it was also
deemed the loftiest and the purest; and when Aristotle ranked [333] the
tragic higher than even the epic muse, he probably did but explain the
reasons for a preference which the generality of critics were disposed
to accord to her. [334]

II. The career of the most majestic of the Greek poets was eminently
felicitous. His birth was noble, his fortune affluent; his natural
gifts were the rarest which nature bestows on man, genius and beauty.
All the care which the age permitted was lavished on his education.
For his feet even the ordinary obstacles in the path of distinction
were smoothed away. He entered life under auspices the most
propitious and poetical. At the age of sixteen he headed the youths
who performed the triumphant paean round the trophy of Salamis. At
twenty-five, when the bones of Theseus were borne back to Athens in
the galley of the victorious Cimon, he exhibited his first play, and
won the prize from Aeschylus. That haughty genius, whether indignant
at the success of a younger rival, or at a trial for impiety before
the Areopagus, to which (though acquitted) he was subjected, or at the
rapid ascendency of a popular party, that he seems to have scorned
with the disdain at once of an eupatrid and a Pythagorean, soon after
retired from Athens to the