not Euripides, who professed to doubt, was the real scoffer.
There is space for only a few samples of the moral opinions of Euripides, Shakespeare's reputation with posterity might have fared very scurvily had there been a great comic poet among his detractors, opposed to him in theology or politics, or jealous of the company kept by him at the Mermaid. Only impute to the author personally the sentiments he ascribes to Iago, Iachimo, Richard of Gloucester, Edmund in "Lear," or Lady Macbeth,—refer to certain things connected with his marriage or his poaching,—and the purest in morals as well as the loftiest in thought of our own scenic poets would have made as poor a figure as Euripides did in his time, whether it were on the grounds of his creed, his civic character, or his private life and conversation. "Envie," says Chaucer, in his 'Legende of Good Women,'
"Is lavender to the court alway,
For she ne parteth neither night ne day
Out of the house of Cæsar;"
and the envy of one generation becomes with the credulous the fact of another. "In the first place," as Mr Paley most justly observes, "many of his sentiments which may be said to wear an equivocal complexion, as the famous one,—
"If the tongue swore, the heart abides unsworn,"—
have been misconstrued as undermining the very foundations of honour and virtue. They are assumed to be
