strongest light, or tend to cherish his confidence, and allay his fears. Thus the scene with Jocasta in which his apprehensions are first awakened, arises out of the suspicion he has conceived of Creon, which, unjust and arbitrary as it is, is the only refuge he has been able to find from the necessity of believing Tiresias. The tidings from Corinth, by which he and Jocasta are so elated as to question the prescience of the gods, leads to the discovery which fixes her doom. Still more remarkable is the mode in which this is connected with the following and final stage of the solution. Œdipus has reason to dread that the arrival of the herdsman may confirm his worst fears as to the death of Laius. Yet he forgets this as a slight care in his impatience to ascertain his parentage: hence the Chorus bursts out into a strain of joy at the prospect of the festive rites with which Cithæron—a spot to be henceforth so dear to the royal family—will be honoured, when the happy discovery shall be made: and Œdipus presses the herdsman on this subject with sanguine eagerness, which will bear no evasion or delay, and never ceases to hope for the best, until he has extorted the truth which shews him the whole extent of his calamity.
No sooner has the film dropped from his eyes than he condemns himself to perpetual darkness, to the state which, but a short time before, had been the subject of his taunts on Tiresias. The feeling by which he is urged thus to verify the seer's prediction, is not the horror of the light and of all the objects it can present to him, but indignation at his own previous blindness. The eyes which have served him so ill, which have seen without discerning what it was most important for him to know, shall be for ever extinguished[1]. And in this condition, most wretched, most helpless, he enters once more, to exhibit a perfect contrast to his appearance in the opening scene, and thus to reverse that irony, of which we have hitherto seen but one side. While he saw the light of day, he had been ignorant, infatuated, incapable of distinguishing truth from falsehood, friend from foe. Now he clearly perceives all that concerns him; he is conscious of the differ-
