of Milton (1674), though its main figure reminds us of the Œdipus Coloneus of Sophocles, yet shows us in every page the author's predilection for Euripides. Nor is this preference shown in his play only. Critics have justly pointed to the description of the two brothers in Comus (vv. 297 sqq.) as borrowed from the herd's description of Orestes and Pylades in the Tauric Iphigenia (vv. 264 sqq.). I cannot find in any of the biographies that Milton was versed in French literature, or influenced by the new triumph of classical tragedy on the French stage; and, indeed, his Samson is a far more faithful and splendid imitation of the Greek models than anything ever done by modern poets. But this performance, if really independent of the French, is the more remarkable, because in his preface Milton evidently censures the school of Shakspere, and reverts to the Greeks as the true models of a drama suited to the sober and respectable classes of society.[1]
119. This great man, however, anticipated a remarkable movement. For with the Restoration, French theories and models began to be studied, and we find for nearly a century a perpetual insisting upon classical theories and an incessant copying of Greek models, often through Latin, still oftener through French, but
- ↑ Here are his words: "Heretofore men in highest dignity have laboured not a little to be thought able to compose a tragedy; of that honour Dionysius the elder was no less ambitious, than before of his attaining to the tyranny. Augustus Cæsar also had begun his Ajax; but, unable to please his own judgment with what he had begun, left it unfinished. Seneca, the philosopher, is by some thought the author of those tragedies (at least the best of them) that go under that name. Gregory Nazianzen, a father of the church, thought it not unbeseeming the sanctity of his person to write a tragedy, which is entitled 'Christ Suffering.' This is mentioned to vindicate tragedy from the small esteem or rather infamy, which in the acct of many it undergoes at this day with other common interludes; happening through the poet's errour of intermixing comick stuff with tragick sadness and gravity; or introducing trivial and vulgar persons, which by all judicious hath been counted absurd; and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people."
