Immediately in front of the stage, as with us, was the orchestra; but it was of much larger dimensions, not only positively, but in proportion to the theatre.  In our playhouses it is exclusively inhabited by fiddles and their fiddlers; the ancients appropriated it to more dignified purposes; for there stood the high altar of Bacchus, richly ornamented and elevated, and around it moved the sacred Chorus to solemn measures, in stately array and in magnificent vestments, with crowns and incense, chanting at intervals their songs, and occupied in their various rites, as we have before mentioned.  It is one of the many instances of uninterrupted traditions, that this part of our theatres is still devoted to receive musicians, although, in comparison with their predecessors, they are of an ignoble and degenerate race.

The use of masks was another remarkable peculiarity of the ancient acting.  It has been conjectured, that the tragic mask was invented to conceal the face of the actor, which, in a small city like Athens, must have been known to the greater part of the audience, as vulgar in expression, and it sometimes would have brought to mind most unseasonably the remembrance of a life and of habits, that would have repelled all sympathy with the character which he was to personate.  It would not have been endured, that a player should perform the part of a monarch in his ordinary dress, nor that of a hero with his own mean physiognomy.  It is probable, also, that the likeness of every hero of tragedy was handed down in statues, medals, and paintings, or even in a series of masks; and that the countenance of Theseus, or of Ajax, was as well known to the spectators as the face of any of their contemporaries.  Whenever a living character was introduced by name, as Cleon or Socrates, in the old comedy, we may suppose that the mask was a striking, although not a flattering portrait.  We cannot doubt, that these masks were made with great care, and were skilfully painted, and finished with the nicest accuracy; for every art was brought to a focus in the Greek theatres.  We must not imagine, like schoolboys, that the tragedies of Sophocles were performed at Athens in such rude masks as are exhibited in our music shops.  We have some representations of them in antique sculptures and paintings, with features somewhat distorted, but of exquisite and inimitable beauty.

THE ROMAN STAGE.

The Drama of ancient Rome possesses little of originality or interest.  The word Histrio is said to be of Etruscan origin; the Tuscans, therefore, had their theatres; but little information can now be gleaned respecting them.  It was long before theatres were firmly and permanently established in Rome; but the love of these diversions gradually became too powerful for the censors, and the Romans grew, at last, nearly as fond of them as the Greeks.  The latter, as St. Augustine informs us, did not consider the profession of a player as dishonourable: