table, feeling in the audience, and one which the advocate of the slave would share with them.
We must now dismiss the scenic philosopher, trusting that some of the facts, if not the arguments, adduced on his behalf, may prevail with English readers so far as to lead them to take a more favourable view of his character than has been given in some ancient or modern accounts of it. Had he been less philosophic, he would probably have been more successful at the time, and less obvious to critical shafts then and afterwards. Yet that so many of his works should have been preserved, can scarcely have been a mere accident. Some attraction or charm there was in them that touched the heart of Hellas from its eastern to its western border, and so held above water a fourth at least of his writings, when the deluge of barbarism or bigotry swept away so many thousands of Greek dramas, and among them some that had borne off the crown from Æschylus or Sophocles. "Sunt lacrimæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt." The very tenderness of Euripides, though taxed with effeminacy or degradation of art by critics of the Aristophanic school, may have had its influence in the salvage of seventeen plays and fragments of others, exceeding in number the sum of those of both his extant compeers.
Having passed in review the times, the life, and other circumstances relating to Euripides, we may now pass on to a survey of his dramas.
