chosen with great judgment. The reader will be pleased with the maternal affection and solid reasoning of Jocasta; he will acknowledge the interview of the brothers to be well conducted, and their characters nicely distinguished; he will admire the glorious resolution of Menaceus, and be touched with the manly sorrow and firm dignity of the injured and unhappy Edipus: but nothing can be more affecting than the tender lamentations, the noble yet feminine spirit, and the filial piety of Antigone. Eschylus is always sublime; his conceptions are great, and expressed with inimitable force and fire: no man ever succeeded so well in raising terror. The genius of Euripides is less ardent, but this is compensated by a tender and feeling heart; to this he always gives way; and never fails to raise those sadly sweet emotions of sympathetic sorrow, of which he himself was so sensible: no man ever succeeded so well in raising pity.

P. Brumoy seems inclined to censure the part of Menæceus as episodical, and subordinate to the action of the drama: he says, with his usual good sense, that the Greek poets rarely admitted these episodes, as being contrary to the effect of the principal action, and turning aside, at least dividing, the attention of the spectator. But it is not so here; in ancient Greece few important actions were carried on without oracles, sacrifices, and expiations; and the sacred dragon held so great a share in the history of Thebes, that the Poet had reason to make this atonement for the slaughter of him; so that the sacrifices of Menaceus was a proper part of the principal action. Brumoy was so well acquainted with ancient customs and manners, that this could not escape him; but the truth was this, he gave his view of the Greek theatre with the laudable inten

tion of reforming the taste of his countrymen, and to bring them back to the beautiful simplicity of the ancients; the critic was well qualified for his task, but the taste of the age was against him; and to gain an hearing, he was obliged to manage a little, and throw back some of his censure on the ancients, by which means it was softened, and in some sort brought its excuse with it when applied to his cotemporaries; this we may collect from his concluding words, Après tout celui d'Euripide, quoiqu'un peu tiré, justifieroit ceux de nos jours, si on ne les poussoit pas plus loin qu'il ne l'a fait, et si on ne les faisoit rouler presque toujours sur l'amour. Though the state of the French theatre warranted this general reflection, yet we may suppose that the critic particularly glanced at the love-scenes in Les Freres Ennemis of Racine: but as the author requests indulgence for that piece, as being written in his early youth, not to grant it to the merit of his riper years would be uncandid. Seneca also wrote a tragedy on this subject; mutilated as it is, enough remains to shew us the bad taste of that outrageous and unnatural writer; his extravagance deserves no pardon.

So much is said in this tragedy of the Theban Dragon, that the English reader may not be displeased with an account of a few of these enormous monsters, just to shew him what idea the ancients had of their prodigious size. This is described by Ovid with all the luxuriance of his vivid imagination: the Delphic Python and the Lernean Hydra are well known; this latter is here sculptured in the shield of Adrastus as having an hundred heads, and holding a Theban in each of its hundred jaws. The horrid Dragon, that guarded the Golden Fleece, in length and bulk exceeded a ship of fifty oars: Pindar, Pyth. Ode iv. Such

also was the wakeful keeper of the garden of the Hesperides. Statius, who was not of a genius to let any thing vast escape him, has given a very spirited description of an immense serpent, Thebaid. v.

Sublime on radiant spires he glides along,
And brandishes by fits his triple tongue,
An hideous length of tail behind he draws,
And foamy venom issues from his jaws.
Three rows of teeth his mouth expanded shews,
And from his crest terrific glories rose.-
One while he rolls his curling volumes round
The sylvan fane, or ploughs the furrow'd ground;
Then round an oak his scaly length he twines,
And breaks in his embrace the toughest pines:
From bank to bank extended oft he lies,
Cut by his scales the waves high bubbling rise.

LEWIS.

Nor is this merely the amplification of poetry. Diodorus Siculus, 1. 3. tells us, that the Ethiopians, who dwell near their wild and savage deserts, affirm that they have seen serpents of an hundred cubits in length; and that when in the plains the largest of these roll themselves round, spire upon spire, they have at a distance the appearance of hills. One of these some hunters of the second Ptolemy found means to take alive, and carried it to Alexandria; but this was only thirty cubits long: when he was first attacked, the hunters were struck with terror as they beheld his fiery eyes, his vibrating tongue, the roughness of his scales rattling over the wood that bent beneath him, the immense greatness of his teeth, the dreadful gaping of his jaws, and the astonishing height of his rising spires: in their fright they threw their net short; it fell upon his tail; at the touch the monster twisted himself round with horrible hissings, and rising above the

head of the man nearest to him, seized him with his jaws, and devoured him alive; another at a greater distance he entangled in the spire of his tail, and drew to him; the others fled: yet in expectation of the favour and liberality of the king, who was fond of collecting strange animals, they attempted him a second time by stratagem, and succeeded: hunger subdued his fierceness, and Ptolemy kept him tame as a wonderful sight to all strangers that came to Alexandria. Even the sober dignity of Roman history has recorded a serpent of an amazing size which infested the camp of Regulus at Bagrada; this they attacked with the engines then used to batter towns; it was an hundred and twenty feet long; Regulus sent its skin and jaws to Rome, where it remained an hundred and fifteen years hung up in a temple. These accounts, the reader may say, are drawn from fabulous antiquity; but they are exceeded by a modern and right reverend writer; Pontoppidan, in his natural history of Norway, gives an account of a snake in the deep northern sea six hundred feet long, which rises so high out of the water, that its head reaches above a ship's main top;

-his other parts besides

Prone on the flood, extended long and large,

Lie floating many a rood.

The Scene is in the court before the royal Palace at Thebes.