Haem. O prophet, OEdipus is now no more!  O cursed effect of the most deep despair!

Tir. Cease your complaints, and bear his body hence;
The dreadful sight will daunt the drooping Thebans,
Whom heaven decrees to raise with peace and glory. 
Yet, by these terrible examples warned,
The sacred Fury thus alarms the world:—­
Let none, though ne’er so virtuous, great, and high,
Be judged entirely blest before they die. [Exeunt.

Footnotes: 
1.  Imitated from the commencement of the plague in the first book of
   the Iliad.

2.  The story of the Sphinx is generally known:  She was a monster, who
   delighted in putting a riddle to the Thebans, and slaying each poor
   dull Boeotian, who could not interpret it.  OEdipus guessed the
   enigma, on which the monster destroyed herself for shame.  Thus he
   attained the throne of Thebes, and the bed of Jocasta.

3.  To dare a lark, is to fly a hawk, or present some other object of
   fear, to engage the bird’s attention, and prevent it from taking
   wing, while the fowler draws his net: 

     Farewell, nobility; let his grace go forward,
     And dare us with his cap, like larks.
                                   Henry VIII. Act III.  Scene II.

4.  The carelessness of OEdipus about the fate of his predecessor is
   very unnatural; but to such expedients dramatists are often
   reduced, to communicate to their audience what must have been known
   to the persons of the drama.

5. Start is here, and in p. 136, used for started, being borrowed
   from sterte, the old perfect of the verb.

6.  It is a common idea, that falling stars, as they are called, are
   converted into a sort of jelly.  “Among the rest, I had often the
   opportunity to see the seeming shooting of the stars from place to
   place, and sometimes they appeared as if falling to the ground,
   where I once or twice found a white jelly-like matter among the
   grass, which I imagined to be distilled from them; and hence
   foolishly conjectured, that the stars themselves must certainly
   consist of a like substance.”

7.  Serpens, serpentem vorans, fit draco.  Peccata, peccatis
   superaddita, monstra fiunt. Hieroglyphica animalium, per
   Archibaldum Simsonum Dalkethensis Ecclesiae pastorem, p. 95.

8.  The idea of this sacred grove seems to be taken from that of
   Colonus near Athens, dedicated to the Eumenides, which gives name
   to Sophocles’s second tragedy.  Seneca describes the scene of the
   incantation in the following lines: