divine nature. For the opinions of the philosopher, the reader is referred to the volume of this series in which the writings of Xenophon are treated of. There is, however, a remarkable passage in Plato's dialogue entitled 'Phædo,' in which Socrates enumerates as one among the boons death will confer on him, the privilege he will have, when he has shaken off this mortal coil, of knowing better the great gods, and of seeing them with a clearness of vision unattainable by mortals on earth. Euripides, on his side, may have held it to be part of a poet's high position to hint, if not to expound formally to his hearers, that the deities whom the tragedians represented as severe, revengeful, and relentless beings, were merciful as well as just,—that the humanity of Prometheus was at least as divine as the tyranny of Jupiter, or the feuds and caprices of Apollo and Artemis. It was, perchance, among the offences given by Euripides to the comic poets, that his spiritual and intangible god could not, like Neptune, Iris, Hercules, or Bacchus, be parodied by them on the stage. The idols of the temple were by the vulgar esteemed true portraits of the beings whom they affected to revere, but at whom they were always ready to laugh. Neptune and Hercules, in the comedy of the "Birds" of Aristophanes, might be bribed by savoury meats, or hide themselves under an umbrella; but the "great gods" whom the pious Socrates yearned to behold were beyond the reach, and perhaps the comprehension, of the satirist.
We can afford only to hint that the poet's religious opinions, so far as they can be gathered from his
