Whate'er becomes of me, when thou shalt reach
That envied pinnacle of human greatness
Where faithful monitors but rarely follow,
Even then amidst the kindest smiles of fortune,
Forget not thou wert once distress'd and friendless.
Be strictly just, but yet, like Heaven, with mercy
Temper thy justice. From thy purged ear
Banish base flattery, and spurn the wretch
Who would persuade thee thou art more than man;
Weak, erring, selfish man, endued with power
To be the minister of public good.
If conquest charm thee, and the pride of war
Blaze on thy sight, remember thou art placed
The guardian of mankind, nor build thy fame
On rapines and on murders. Should soft peace
Invite to luxury, the pleasing bane
Of happy kingdoms, know from thy example,
The bliss and woe of nameless millions, springs
Their virtue or their vice. Nor think by laws
To curb licentious man; those laws alone
Can bend the headstrong many to their yoke,
Which make it present int'rest to obey them.
In discarding all supernatural aid, Whitehead has robbed the subject of much of its poetry. The power of fate and of the unseen world is removed, and Aletes influences the Pythian priestess to give a particular response. Now this treatment of the subject, though the play was meant for an English, and not a Greek audience, does not seem to be artistic. If the matter of the plot be drawn from Greek history or mythology, should it not be essentially Greek in plot, incident, thought, feeling, indeed, in everything but the language? Would an ancient dramatist have dared to represent the utterances from the tripod as influenced by such a man as Aletes?
These are the faults of a play which in the main is interesting and pleasing, and will well repay the labour of perusal. We named in connection with the "Creusa" of Whitehead, and the "Ion" of Euripides, the "Ion" of Sir Thomas Talfourd. It borrows only the name of the
