Faustus; the chief gift
which he exacted from the fiend. To see Helen of Greece? Dr. Faustus, we
_have_ seen her: Mr. Murray is the Mephistopheles that showed her to us.
It was cheap at the price of a journey to Siberia, and is the next best
thing to having seen Waterloo at sunset on the 18th of June, 1815. [13]
FOOTNOTES
[1] '_When sown_;' as it has been repeatedly; a fact which some
readers may not be aware of.
[2] Boileau, it is true, translated Longinus. But there goes little Greek
to _that_. It is in dealing with Attic Greek, and Attic _poets_,
that a man can manifest his Grecian skill.
[3] 'Before God was known;'--i.e. known in Greece.
[4] At times, I say pointedly, the _Athenian_ rather than the
_Grecian_ tragedy, in order to keep the reader's attention awake to a
remark made by Paterculus,--viz. That although Greece coquettishly
welcomed homage to herself, as generally concerned in the Greek
literature, in reality Athens only had any original share in the drama, or
in the oratory of Greece.
[5] '_The supreme artist_:'--It is chiefly by comparison with Euripides,
that Sophocles is usually crowned with the laurels of _art_. But there is
some danger of doing wrong to the truth in too blindly adhering to these
old rulings of critical courts. The judgments would sometimes be reversed,
if the pleadings were before us. There were blockheads in those days.
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