with arguments which in substance condemn them: and though Mr Campbell assures us that "the interest does not at all flag in the remainder of the tragedy," we want some better explanation of the grounds of this opinion, than is to be found in the remark: "that the Greeks attached an awfully religious importance to the rites of burial," which would apply equally to many other tragedies which do not end in like manner: or in the assertion: that "we feel the hero's virtues to be told with the deepest effect when his widow and child kneel as suppliants to heaven and human mercy, beside his corps: when his spirited brother defies the threats of the Atridæ to deny him sepulchral honors: and when Ulysses with politic magnanimity interposes to prevent the mean insult being offered to his fallen enemy." The celebration of a hero's virtues after his death is surely not a legitimate object of tragedy: nor is it true that those of Ajax are more effectually told by his widow and child when they kneel beside his corps, than when they cling to him during his life: or by Teucer and Ulysses when they interpose in his behalf, than they had previously been in the first scene by the admission of an enemy, and afterward by the attachment and admiration exprest by his friends. Still less can the conclusion of the piece be defended on the ground that "it leaves our sympathies calmed and elevated by the triumph of Ulysses in assuaging the vindictiveness of Agamemnon, and attaching the gratitude of Teucer." Our sympathies with Ajax have already been calmed and elevated by the serenity and majesty of his departure: with Ulysses we have none sufficiently powerful to keep up our interest during the following scenes: if we had, this would imply a want of unity, which would be as great a defect as that which has been made the subject of complaint. In order to justify the poet by shewing the connexion between these scenes and the preceding part of the play, it is absolutely necessary to take into account a circumstance which Welcker, though not the first to notice it, has placed in a clearer light than any former writer: that Ajax was an object, not merely of human interest, but of religious veneration, with the audience for whom Sophocles wrote. The Athenians were proud of him as one of their heroes, who, since Clisthenes, gave his name to a tribe which was distinguished by some pecu-
