work, it is my part to keep the house in good order; when the labourer returns he is pleased to find his home comfortable.' 'Well then, go if you will,' he says; 'the well is not far, and I with the break of day must go to plough and sow my seed; for no idler by talking about Providence will earn a livelihood without labour.' On his return, I suppose towards noon, he finds two young strangers (Orestes and Pylades) talking to his wife, and is surprised, as it was unseemly for a Greek woman (of Athenian habits) to be seen so employed. But she at once sees and removes his suspicions by telling him that they have brought news of her brother (v. 345 sqq.). Then you should long since have thrown your door open. Come in strangers, and I will give you what hospitality my house can afford in requital for your good news. Make no difficulties, coming welcome to me from a dear friend, for though I be poor, you will not find me mean.'

'Is this,' asks Orestes, 'the husband who has treated you so nobly?' and he turns to the audience in a splendid monologue, which I hold to be Euripides' deepest reflections on the true causes of honour among men. His characters, in fifty places, assert the strange power of an ancient lineage in maintaining under the greatest misfortunes a noble and princely bearing; in as many more, they assert that the poor and despised, nay even the slaves, have in them these virtues beyond their station; so true and human and many-sided was he, in contrast, I believe, with most of his contemporaries.

Here then is the sum and substance of these true, but partially conflicting facts in human nature. There is

no plummet to measure excellence, for the varying natures of men confuse our reckoning. Oft have I seen the son of an honourable father worth nothing, and again good children sprung from evil parents; have seen leanness in the soul of the rich, and a large heart in the body of the poor. How then can we surely discriminate the good? Is it by the test of wealth? Then should we indeed employ an unjust judge. Is it by poverty? But this too has its weakness, and makes men mean by its necessities. Shall I take the test of arms? Who looking to the array of battle could testify to real worth? It is better to leave these things undetermined; for here is a man, not great among his fellows, nor supported by the pride of family, yet he has been found among the crowd a man of the highest excellence. Will not ye learn wisdom, that speculate full of vain theories, and will ye not judge men by personal experience, and the noble by their characters?'

I would willingly translate the sequel (404 sqq.), where the painting is intensely modern and human. El. My dear fellow, when you know the indigence of your house, why have you invited these guests who are beyond your station?' The Peasant-' Why not? if they are well born, as they seem to be, will they not be as well satisfied with scanty fare.' She then urges him, if he will have it so, to send to an old retainer, who has been dismissed from the palace, and feeds cattle at the boundaries; he will bring with him some provisions. Very well,' he answers, but do you go in and make ready. When a woman tries she can find many little additions to a

dinner. But there is surely in the house at least. enough to satisfy these men for a day. When I turn to think of these things I see how valuable money is to entertain strangers, or to spend upon yourself when you fall sick, but for our daily sustenance, it matters little; when each has had enough, the rich man and the poor are after all on an equal footing.' Nothing can be more natural than this scene; how often even now-a-days does the careful wife protest against the husband's reckless hospitality, on the very ground that they have no proper means of entertaining, and does not the husband answer with the same off-hand vagueness, thinking that a hearty welcome and good intentions are a sufficient substitute for scanty fare?

This

The play is not less striking for our purpose when Clytemnestra (v. 998 sqq.) comes to pay the young people a visit. She orders her Phrygian attendants to get out, and give her a hand while she steps out of her carriage, which Electra spitefully offers to do, being, as she says, just as great a slave as they. leads to some mutual recriminations between mother and daughter, which Euripides with his Athenian notions extends beyond the limits of modern taste. Clytemnestra tries to end it amicably (v. 1100 sqq.) by saying that by nature some children are devoted to their fathers, some to their mothers, and that therefore she cannot blame Electra. She then (v. 1135) orders her attendants to bring round her carriage to the stables, and to have it ready when they think her business is completed. When she is entering the house, Electra tells her to take care that the smoky cabin does not

stain her robes,' an advice which many an Irish lady has received in our day.

These accessory parts of the tragedy give us, I conceive, an excellent sketch of lower class life in the outskirts of Athens in the poet's day, and it is herein such scenery and in his characters, that we must seek for evidence of social life and habits 1. It has been, I know, the habit from the days of Aristophanes to the present to quote the utterances of Euripides' heroes, spoken in character, as the poet's own sentiments. The celebrated line ἡ γλῶσσ ̓ ὁμώμοχ ̓ ἡ δὲ φρὴν ȧvæμoтós-My tongue has sworn, but my mind is free,' which is ridiculed by Aristophanes, is for example, in its place perfectly just and harmless; You have bound my tongue, but my mind, which was deceived as to the circumstances, has not consented to the oath.' And these words, harmless as they are, but spoken in a burst of wrath, are retracted by the very speaker, a few lines farther on, when he says, that had he not been deceived into taking an oath, he would certainly have told what he is now bound to conceal. There is no clearer and better specimen than this of the sort of criticism which suited Aristophanes well enough, and of which he knew the value well enough, but of which modern critics ought to be ashamed. Thus for

1 This is indeed what Aristophanes makes him say: (Ran. 912) oikeîa πράγματ ̓ εἰσάγων, οἷς χρώμεθ', οἷς ξύνεσμεν, and the women who accuse him in the Thesmoph. comically amplify this, stating that, owing to his teaching, old men would not marry young wives; that others had got safe locks with many wards for the store-rooms, and kept the keys; that others had fierce dogs which kept away adulterers.

example, on the goodness or badness of women, on the value of high birth or its worthlessness, on aristocracy and democracy, on almost any social question, we can put together series of quotations on opposite sides. Of course there are German critics whose inner consciousness tells them exactly when the poet is speaking for himself; but for my part, except in such cases as Orestes' Monologue above cited, which contains a mediation between two series of contradictory passages of equal weight, I cannot lift the veil which the poet has not chosen to withdraw. In some of his choruses, which he certainly made the vehicle of philosophical reflections often loosely connected with the action of the play, we may perhaps find an index of his thoughts, but from his dialogues, which are highly dramatic, we can for this very reason draw no sure conclusions.

The characters1 of Euripides, on the contrary, are all-important, as he confessedly drew them from real, and even ordinary life, and they are therefore necessarily fair specimens of what might be found in Athenian

1 It is very curious, and has not been, I think, sufficiently observed, that Greek tragedy differed widely from the modern in not preserving the same type for the same hero throughout different pieces. The Creon of Sophocles' Antigone, is not the same character as the Creon of the Edipus, and if it be argued that royalty had spoilt him-a very true Greek feature—I can show unmistakeable cases in Euripides. The Menelaus and Helen of the Orestes are the very opposite of those of the Helena; the Odysseus of the Cyclops is quite at variance with the Odysseus of the Hecuba and other plays. I do not know the reason of this indifference to fixed types, fixed too for all time and for every spectator, in Homer, when the very nature of Greek tragedy was unity and fixity of type in a formal sense.