The Comus and the Samson Agonistes are works which, though of very different merit, offer some marked points of resemblance.  Both are lyric poems in the form of plays.  There are perhaps no two kinds of composition so essentially dissimilar as the drama and the ode.  The business of the dramatist is to keep himself out of sight, and to let nothing appear but his characters.  As soon as he attracts notice to his personal feelings, the illusion is broken.  The effect is as unpleasant as that which is produced on the stage by the voice of a prompter or the entrance of a scene-shifter.  Hence it was that the tragedies of Byron were his least successful performances.  They resemble those pasteboard pictures invented by the friend of children, Mr. Newbery, in which a single movable head goes round twenty different bodies, so that the same face looks out upon us successively, from the uniform of a hussar, the furs of a judge, and the rags of a beggar.  In all the characters, patriots and tyrants, haters and lovers, the frown and sneer of Harold were discernible in an instant.  But this species of egotism, though fatal to the drama, is the inspiration of the ode.  It is the part of the lyric poet to abandon himself, without reserve, to his own emotions.

Between these hostile elements many great men have endeavored to effect an amalgamation, but never with complete success.  The Greek drama, on the model of which the Samson was written, sprang from the ode.  The dialogue was ingrafted on the chorus, and naturally partook of its character.  The genius of the greatest of the Athenian dramatists co-operated with the circumstances under which tragedy made its first appearance.  Aeschylus was, head and heart, a lyric poet.  In his time, the Greeks had far more intercourse with the East than in the days of Homer; and they had not yet acquired that immense superiority in war, in science, and in the arts, which, in the following generation, led them to treat the Asiatics with contempt.  From the narrative of Herodotus it should seem that they still looked up, with the veneration of disciples, to Egypt and Assyria.  At this period, accordingly, it was natural that the literature of Greece should be tinctured with the Oriental style.  And that style, we think, is discernible in the works of Pindar and Aeschylus.  The latter often reminds us of the Hebrew writers.  The Book of Job, indeed, in conduct and diction, bears a considerable resemblance to some of his dramas.  Considered as plays, his works are absurd; considered as choruses they are above all praise.  If, for instance, we examine the address of Clytemnestra to Agamemnon on his return, or the description of the seven Argive chiefs, by the principles of dramatic writing, we shall instantly condemn them as monstrous.  But if we forget the characters, and think only of the poetry, we shall admit that it has never been surpassed in energy and magnificence.  Sophocles made the Greek drama as dramatic as was consistent with its original form.