morally purified, but rather as justly punished for her crime. Hence the reproofs which in Hamlet are urged by an affectionate son, are by Euripides put into the mouth of the sarcastic revengeful Electra.
75. We have now reviewed this side of the poet's genius with as much detail as our space permits. There is but little to be said about lesser female characters, such as nurses, in the plays. The nurse of the Medea is merely an old and trusty but somewhat sententious servant. The nurse of Phædra is the prototype of Juliet's nurse, a person in whom attachment and complaisance replace morality, and who in the Hippolytus is dramatically very useful by conveying the declaration which Phædra is too noble and modest to utter. This delicacy in the drawing of Phædra was lost upon Seneca and Racine, who degrade her to be her own advocate before the astonished Hippolytus.
The total outcome of the foregoing chapter may perhaps seem poor to some readers accustomed to the study of Shakspere's characters. It is therefore but fair to observe, in conclusion, that quite apart from the injustice of comparing anyone else with so unique a genius as Shakspere, there are distinct reasons why the characters of Euripides, even were they equally well drawn, should not appear to us so various or life-like. For we do not always remember when reading Greek tragedies, that they are interpreted to us either by Greek scholiasts, the most hopelessly undramatic of men, or by modern professors, who are hardly better judges of the stage. Thus there is not a really subtle point in the Greek play which these people can appreciate, and we even find in the Greek scholia objections to the finest passages of extant plays. In no case, except when they have been acted in loose and unfaithful modern versions, has any one of them been studied by a practical actor. The plays of Shakspere, on the other hand, are handed down to us not merely with a body of textual criticism, but
