play is a good one to begin with—it is much the most universally interesting of the surviving dramas of Æschylus. There is very little in it that is exclusively Greek or Athenian; no allusions, or very few, to historical events or national institutions, so that it is as suitable almost to one place and time as to another. The spectacle of a god suffering for the sake of men, so wonderful a prophecy as it is of the great fact of Christianity, has, for most minds, a strong fascination. Goethe, Shelley, and many others, have tried their hands upon the subject—not, it is true, following the plain story of Æschylus, but each adapting the materials to his own creed. Goethe's work is only a fragment. The "Prometheus Unbound" of Shelley, though it is a poem in many points painful and in many fantastic, yet has many passages which illustrate Æschylus with remarkable clearness. But one thing must always prevent any modern adaptation of the situation from being complete, if it is to avoid being blasphemous. In the Greek play Prometheus represents the cause of man against Zeus, and openly rebels against him. Now, so long as the supreme god is represented as wicked or unjust, such an attitude can be an object of sympathy; but to those who believe in the true God, a rebel against Him cannot be regarded as a friend to men, or be an object of anything but hatred. Hence it is that the nearest parallel to Prometheus which modern literature affords is Satan himself in "Paradise Lost." As a spectacle of indomitable will, not succumbing under torture, and raising to the last a voice of defiance to heaven, Satan is the very coun-
