fain disturb him at the end. But he is far removed from the strife and passion of this world, and when young Polyneices, fair, false and fickle, endeavours to enlist his father’s sympathies the lad receives the awful answer: “Dry were your eyes, hard as stone your heart, dumb your lips, when I went forth from Thebes friendless and alone. Here then is your reward: before the Walls of Thebes you shall perish, pierced by your brother’s hand, and there your brother shall die slain by you.” This terrible imprecation is only too terribly fulfilled, and defying the laws of King Creon, who would have the curse-polluted ghosts of the brothers seek for rest in vain even in Hades, Antigone meets her doom. Nor does Creon, the respectable Creon, weak and spiteful, impotent, yet a tyrant, escape scathless. His malice is sharply punished, owing to his own folly and cruelty he loses both wife and son, for he has forgotten that great truth which S. Thomas enunciated, that “reason is the first principle of all human works,”[40] and “the secular power is subject to the spiritual even as the body is subject to the soul.” So owing to his impiety he is left without child to carry on his name, bereaved of all, broken and collapsed, piteously confessing himself—μάταιον ἄνδρα—a feckless and foolish old man.
It has seemed worth while thus very briefly and inadequately to review these two great themes of Greek tragedy, since in both instances they set forth in detail the terrible and relentless working of a curse, which it may be said has something of that divine vengeance that visits “the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation.” And so something of this old Greek doctrine was very true, for who can foresee the end of the working of a curse? Even to-day there are places and there are properties in England which owing to deeds of blood and violence in their acquisition entail some dire misfortune upon all who seek to enjoy and possess them. Such a place is the ruined Abbey of Glastonbury, and of many another house—Tintern, Newstead, Cowdray, Waverley, Barlings, Croxton, Dureford—the tale is true. De male quaesita non gaudet tertius Haeres, says the old adage, and it is well known that lands wrested from the Church will not descend in due course owing to a failure of heirs. Such a case has come under my own observation, and Aubrey in his Miscellanies cites Hinton Charterhouse
