statecraft, his iconoclastic spirit towards the all-admired Homeric demi-gods, his sympathy with the dumb and uninterpreted generally, he finds his heroism in quiet beings uncontaminated by the world. The hero of the Electra is the Working Peasant, true-hearted, honourable, tactful, and of course as humbly conscious of his inferiority to all the savage chieftains about him as they are confident of their superiority to him. But, above all, Euripides retains his old belief in the infinite possibilities of the untried girl. To take only the complete plays, we have a virgin-martyr for heroine in the Heracleidæ, Hecuba, Iphigenîa in Aulis; we have echoes of her in the Trôiades and the Suppliants. She is always a real character and always different. One pole perhaps is in the Trôiades, where the power to see something beyond this coil of trouble, the second sight of a pure spirit, gets its climax in Cassandra. The other, the more human side, comes out in the Iphigenîa. The young girl, when she first finds that she has been trapped to her death, breaks down, and pleads helplessly, like a child, not to be hurt; then when the first blinding shock is past, when she has communed with herself, when she finds that Achilles is ready to fight and die for her, she rises to the height of glad martyrdom for Hellas' sake. The life of one Achilles is worth that of a thousand mere women, such as she! That is her feeling at the moment when she has risen incomparably beyond every one in the play and made even her own vain young hero humble. Aristotle—such are the pitfalls in the way of human critics—takes her as a type of inconsistency!
An element of brightness comes also in the purely romantic plays of the last years, the Helena and Andromeda.* One is reminded of the Birds (p. 286). Euripides
