ABSTRACT
Irony is so inviting an instrument of literary warfare that there are perhaps few eminent controversial writers who have wholly abstained from the use of it. There is however an irony which deserves to be distinguished from the ordinary species by a different name, and which may be properly called dialectic irony. But there is also a practical irony which is not inconsistent with the highest degree of wisdom and benevolence. The irony in which Sophocles appears to us to have displayed the highest powers of his art, is not equally conspicuous in all his remaining plays, though we believe the perception of it to be indispensable for the full enjoyment of every one of them. Duly to estimate the art of Sophocles, and rightly to understand his designs, one must take into account the resistance of the elements which he had to transform and fashion to his purposes.
