lopment; and if _Egmont_ fails, what
are we to say of _Tasso_ or _Iphigenia_? That the Greek tragedians did
not look to interest as a means of working upon the public, is clear
from the fact that the material of their masterpieces was almost
always known to every one: they selected events which had often been
treated dramatically before. This shows us how sensitive was the
Greek public to the beautiful, as it did not require the interest of
unexpected events and new stories to season its enjoyment.

Neither does the quality of interest often attach to masterpieces of
descriptive poetry. Father Homer lays the world and humanity before us
in its true nature, but he takes no trouble to attract our sympathy
by a complexity of circumstance, or to surprise us by unexpected
entanglements. His pace is lingering; he stops at every scene; he puts
one picture after another tranquilly before us, elaborating it
with care. We experience no passionate emotion in reading him; our
demeanour is one of pure perceptive intelligence; he does not arouse
our will, but sings it to rest; and it costs us no effort to break off
in our reading, for we are not in condition of eager curiosity. This
is all still more true of Dante, whose work is not, in the proper
sense of the word, an epic, but a descriptive poem. The same thing may
be said of the four immortal romances: _Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy,
La Nouvelle Heloise_, and _Wilhelm Meister_. To arouse our interest
is by no means the chief aim of these works; in _Tristram Shandy_ the
hero, even at the end of the book, is only eight years of age.

On the other hand, we must not venture to assert that the quality of
interest is not to be found in masterpieces of literature. We have it
in Schiller's dramas in an appreciable degree, and consequently
they are popular; also in the _Oedipus Rex_ of Sophocles. Amongst
masterpieces of description, we find it in Ariosto's _Orlando
Furioso_; nay, an example of a high degree of interest, bound up with
the beautiful, is afforded in an excellent novel by Walter Scott--_The
Heart of Midlothian_. This is the most interesting work of fiction
that I know, where all the effects due to interest, as I have given
them generally in the preceding remarks, may be most clearly observed.
At the same time it is a very beautiful romance throughout; it shows
the most varied pictures of life, drawn with striking truth; and it
exhibits highly different characters with great ju