uncle, Menelaus, before they die. This suggestion, eagerly adopted by them, that they shall slay Helen and Hermione, and burn the palace, leads us on to several exciting and indeed semi-comic scenes, which are only concluded by the active interference of Apollo, who carries off Helen aloft, and makes peace among the warring relatives. It is this part of the play which has incurred the adverse criticism of modern scholars, and indeed, except in the very comic appearance of the Phrygian slave and his curious monody, no interest remains. The sudden reconciliation and betrothal of deadly enemies at the close is evidently a parody on such dénoûments.
These defects of the play as a whole have naturally prevented any direct imitation of it on the modern stage. But the citations and indirect imitations of the Orestes as well as translations of the great mad scene, have been common in every age. Thus the famous lines on the blessed comfort of sleep to the anxious and the distressed (vv. 211 sqq.) may be frequently paralleled, and nowhere more closely than in two passages of Shakspere. Here is the version of Euripides given by Mr. Symonds:
O soothing sleep, dear friend! best nurse in sickness!
How sweetly came you in my hour of need.
Blest Lethe of all woes, how wise you are,
How worthy of the prayers of wretched men!
The ravings of Orestes have suggested to Goethe in his Iphigenia like wanderings at the moment when his sister declares herself, but anyone who will compare the far-fetched images of Goethe's insanity with the infinite nature of Euripides' scene, will see how far the great imitator falls behind his model. The subject is the same as that of Æschylus' Eumenides, but instead of visible Furies in visible pursuit, the horrors of a diseased imagination, and the sufferings of feverish sleeplessness are brought upon the stage, and the purely human affection of a sister ministers relief to the woes which the very gods cannot heal in Æschylus.
