nd rightly: the likenesses of every kind are far
greater than the differences. The distinctions which led Jebb to
declare it was not Hellenic at all are far less important than the
kinship which made a still greater critic, the poet Goethe, declare
that it had "more of the antique spirit than any production of any
other modern poet."

A more obvious and perhaps more important difference than that on which
Jebb lays such stress is, of course, the fundamental one that the Greek
plays were written for performance and that many of them have {245}
elaborately contrived "plots." No one supposes that _Samson_ would be
effective on the stage; but the modern dramatist who could make his
play as exciting to the spectator as the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ or
_Electra_ of Sophocles, or the _Hippolytus_ or _Medea_ of Euripides,
would assuredly be no ordinary playwright. This Milton did not
attempt. His drama resembles rather the earlier Greek tragedies where
the lyrical element is still the principal thing while the "plot" and
the persons who act its story play a comparatively subordinate part.
It is, at any rate in form, more like Aeschylus than Sophocles, and
more like the _Persae_ and the _Prometheus_ than the Oresteian Trilogy.
To the _Prometheus_, indeed, it bears particularly close and obvious
resemblances; for instance, both have a heroic and defiant prisoner as
their principal figure, and as their minor figures a succession of
friends and enemies who visit him.

However, literary parallels and precedents of this kind are perhaps
rather interesting than important. Milton's greatness is his own.
Only the fact remains that, as it was of an order that need not fear to
measure itself with the Greeks and as he happened to put its dramatic
expression into a Greek form, he has given us something which comes far
{246} nearer to producing on us the particular impression of sublimity
made by the greatest Greek dramas than anything else in English or
perhaps in any modern language. In English nothing worth mentioning of
the kind has been attempted, till in our own day the present Poet
Laureate wrote his _Prometheus the Fire-Giver_ and _Achilles in
Scyros_. But, interesting and beautiful as these are, they make no
pretence to rival _Samson Agonistes_. They are altogether on a smaller
scale of art, of thought, of emotion.

_Samson Agonistes_ is Milton's last word and on the whole his saddest.
Yet the final effect of great art is never