INTRODUCTION. WHEN Milton gave to the world in 1671 his dramatic poem Samson Agonistes, he set before it a short discourse "Of that sort of Dramatic Poem which is call'd Tragedy." The discourse opens thus: "Tragedy, as it was antiently compos'd, hath been ever held the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other Poems: therefore said by Aristotle to be of power by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated." Of the emotions to which man is subject, pity and terror are the most urgent and tense and the most completely concentrated to a single point of time. Unlike the appe-tites hunger and desire, to which they bear a certain analogy in respect of urgency, tension and concentration, the emotions pity and terror have a large share of unselfishness; for pity is mainly unselfish, though closely knit up with the consideration of what one would himself feel in the circumstances of the person pitied; and terror, though primarily selfish, is largely called into play by |