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218 ANCIENT GREECE. [CHAP, xvBut even in answering thiswe might be carried very farif we were to pass the bounds which the character of thiswork prescribes.In speaking of poetry, we would principally consider the dramatic since we;have already spokenof the epic.But the drama can hardly be discussed, separate from lyric poetry. We place the arts in immediateconnexion with poetry, because nature herself had unitedthem amongthe Greeks ; among whom the arts are as itwere the key to poetry. The remark of a modern critic1isperfectly true, that the masterpieces of the plasticart furnish the best commentary on the tragedians. Although itis not always the same persons whom the poets and thesculptors bring before us, we yet derive from them ourconceptions of the ideal forms. He who has seen the subof Niobe and Laocoon, can easily represent tolime figureshis mind an Electra or an (Edipus in the forms underwhich they floated in the mind of the poet.With the advancing culture of Greece, the connexion between poetry and arts and the state increased ;and wasmost intimate in its flourishing age. Even the earliest lawgivers of the Greeks regarded poetry as the chief means offorming the character of youth and;of exercising an influence on their riper years. But in an age when there wasas yet no literature, poetry could not be separate from songand was commonly ;accompanied with an instrument. Hencecame the meaning of the word music, which embraced allthis together. Yet this is chiefly true of lyric poetry, which,as the immediate expression of the feelings of the poet, wasmuch more intimately connected with song than the epic.If we do but bear constantly in mind the leading idea whichthe Greek had framed of a state, as a moral person that wasto govern itself,we can comprehend the whole importance,which music, in the wider sense of the word, possessed inthe eyes of the Grecian lawgivers. It seemed to them inthat age, when there was as yet no philosophic culture,when the feelings and the management of the feelings wereof the greatest moment, the best means of influencing them ;and we need not be astonished, when we read in Plutarch 3Q\T' t^1 ' Ube" d^atische K^st und Litteratur, Th, i. s. 67. A..Schlegcl, on Dramatic Literature. *../ ^* In his essay De Musica. Op. ii. p. 1 131.