! But—Is there not, begging the pardon of the great tragedian, too much reserve in the Agamemnon for our modern taste? If we could have the bath scene represented on the stage, and an Agamemnon who could be really killed—though I would not insist on that, because a good actor might make it a reason for refusing the part—but still the murder ought to take place in public.'
'Shocking! an outrage on all the laws of the drama. Does not even the Roman Horace lay down as a rule the—Nec pueros coram populo Medea trucidet?'
'Fairest and wisest, I am as willing a pupil of the dear old Epicurean as any man living—even to the furnishing of my chamber; of which fact the Empress of Africa may some day assure herself. But we are not now discussing the art of poetry, but the art of reigning; and, after all, while Horace was sitting in his easy-chair, giving his countrymen good advice, a private man, who knew somewhat better than he what the mass admired, was exhibiting forty thousand gladiators at his mother's funeral.'
'But the canon has its foundation in the eternal laws of beauty. It has been accepted and observed.'
'Not by the people for whom it was written. The learned Hypatia has surely not forgotten, that within sixty years after the Ars Poetica was written, Annaeus Seneca, or whosoever wrote that very bad tragedy called the Medea, found it so necessary that she should, in despite of Horace, kill her children before the people, that he actually made her do it!'
Hypatia was still silent—foiled at every point, while Orestes ran on with provoking glibness.
'And consider, too, even if we dare alter Aeschylus a little, we could find no one to act him.'
'Ah, true! fallen, fallen days!'
'And really, after all, omitting the questionable compliment to me, as candidate for a certain dignity, of having my namesake kill his mother, and then be hunted over the stage by furies—'
'But Apollo vindicates and purifies him at last. What a noble occasion that last scene would give for winning them hack to their old reverence for the god!'
'True, but at present the majority of spectators will believe more strongly in the horrors of matricide and furies than in Apollo's power to dispense therewith. So that I fear must be one of your labours of the future.'
'And it shall be,' said Hypatia. But she did not speak cheerfully.
'Do you not think,