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hundred plays constructed on these lines had been produced by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and the lesser stars, and the public and the judges had, after their wont, settled down into the conviction that perfection was stereotyped, a third great genius arose, and had the audacity to reconsider the whole question. And he seems to have begun by going to the root of the matter, and asking, "What is the truest, highest, and most practical function of the drama? Has it no possibilities yet unrealized, no message to the hearts and consciences of these men and women of a new day?" It was indeed a new day: men had lived fast since Athens had entered upon her career of heroism and power. Their thoughts had widened with their knowledge of other peoples: they knew the world was not as the poets of the past had imagined it; and the old-time fables of the Gods, of their amours, their quarrels, their disguises in human form, might still hold a place in the conventions of religion, but had no part in living faith. The spirit of the new scepticism had appeared in Herodotus and Aeschylus: Pindar refused to credit baseness, injustice, and impurity of the Deity. The unreality of the old conceptions of Gods and heroes had forced itself on men's minds; and the Athenians were least of all likely to sacrifice truth, or honest doubt, and free inquiry, to a supposed artistic ideal, or to go on putting new wine into old bottles, to save themselves from "decadence." There is, even in poetry and art, something higher than the worship of the fetish of the ideal. It must be remembered, too, that to suffer the stage to be permanently monopolized by creations raised above the sympathies and needs of common life was to sacrifice far more than would be involved in such a procedure now. The drama, and more especially Tragedy, was the pulpit and the press of the time, the one means of directly influencing popular thought, as the Pnyx was of influencing national action. And such an influence was