self from the bodies of his faithful wife and beloved children, he insists on repeated directions for their funerals, and leaves the stage a subdued and broken-hearted, but not desperate, man. Thus the dignity of a great nature asserts itself against the utmost which a spiteful Providence can do to break it down, and the resigned departure of the hero for Athens is a greater victory over the enmity of Juno, than all the successes of his twelve Labours.
84. Here then we have a truly great and tragic figure, and one worthy of a permanent place in the temple of Fame. But, with these splendid exceptions, it must be confessed that Euripides has not drawn us the heroes we find in Æschylus and in Sophocles. Is it a fault of his genius, or is it the result of deliberate choice? Or, again, is it the accident of tradition, which has not handed us down his Telephus, his Palamedes, and other plays, in which he devoted himself to the portraiture of character? Probably all these causes have contributed to the result. It may be regarded as certain that time has robbed us of companion heroes to Orestes and Heracles; but it is not probable that we have lost a Euripidean Prometheus or Philoctetes equal to those of Æschylus or Sophocles. It may be that he considered the men of the older tragedy as too prominent, and unduly preferred to the equally heroic and devoted women; that he endeavoured to adjust the measure, and vindicate for the gentler sex its tragic position. But it seems also certain that he was so far the child of his age—the thorough Periclean, who worshipped intellect and cleverness, and despised or suspected simple virtues—that neither he nor his audience felt attracted by moral character in comparison to intellect, and that they preferred the excitement of a complicated plot or a pathetic situation, to a detailed portrait of unpractical constancy and impolitic honour.
85. Little need be said on his minor characters. Here, again, we seem to see that spirit of adjusting the balance, of "putting down the mighty from their
