opposition to it, every fault was found with Euripides and every merit denied. More especially, the Electra was singled out for ridicule, in comparison with the parallel plays of Æschylus and Sophocles; and in spite of Goethe and of Schiller—the former an imitator of the Tauric, the other a translator of the Aulid Iphigenia—both of them sincere admirers of Euripides, the fashion at last set in against the poet, and the jibes of Aristophanes were exalted into canons of criticism.
125. The present century, while correcting the antipathies of Schlegel's school, has nevertheless not reinstated Euripides completely into his former position. We understand Æschylus at last, and see in him a giant genius, without parallel in the history of Greek literature. We find in Sophocles a more perfect artist, in complete harmony with his materials, and justifying the uniform favour of the Attic public. But many recent editors and historians, and one of our greatest poets, Mr. Browning, have set themselves to assert for Euripides his true and independent position beside these rivals, who have failed to obscure or displace him. The Germans, indeed, still infected by Schlegel, talk of Euripides as the poet of the ochlocracy, that debased democracy which they have invented at Athens after the suggestion of Thucydides. But a sounder art criticism, based upon the results of English and French scholarship, which does not spoil its delicacy and blunt its edge by the weight of erudition, has turned with renewed affection to the sympathetic genius, who delighted the wild Parthian chiefs with his Bacchic revels, who supplied the patient monk with sorrows for his suffering Christ, who witnessed (in truth a very martyr) to truth and nature in the stilted rhetoric of the Roman stage, in the studied pomp of the French court; who fed the youth of Racine and of Voltaire, who revived the slumbering flame of Alfieri's genius, who even in these latter days has occupied great and original poets of many lands—Schiller, Shelley, Alfieri, Browning—with the task
