fierce chieftains, one of whom covets the property of the other; and the aggressor has the advantage of commanding the services of Heracles. Courage and gallantry he certainly shows, but as 'a friend of humanity' he must be ranked with Hawkins or Sforza. The visitors of Admetus, who know his name and presumably his history, treat him without distinguishing particularity; and from Admetus we learn only that Heracles upon various occasions has received him hospitably at Argos, which is satisfactory but scarcely sublime. What impression of his character an unflattering and uninterested observer might derive from his present employment, as he describes it, and from previous performances (of the same kind so far as appears) to which he alludes, we hear from the servant commissioned by Admetus to make him comfortable:
And so here am I, helping make at home
A guest, some fellow ripe for wickedness,
Robber or pirate!
It is curious that Balaustion, so prompt in observing the superhuman way in which Heracles says 'Yes', 'No', and 'How do you do?', should have heard this pointed remark without any reflexion more precise than broadly to label the speaker a 'creature' and condescendingly dismiss him as one who 'had been right if not so wrong '.
As it is with the 'labours', so it is with all the divine attributes accumulated upon the hero in Browning's enlarged and amended version. They are not to be found in the Alcestis of Euripides. And to prove this absence not accidental we have only to compare the author's Madness of Heracles, where the moral nobility of the hero as the friend of man really is a part of the hypothesis, and all the flowers of Balaustion's ornamentation, labours and trophies, generous toil and grateful world, can be illustrated ad libitum. In fact what Browning has done is just to take the Heracles of the one play and put him, to make a figure of suitable height, on the top of his namesake in the other, 'the God surmounting the man' (as Balaustion says), with what stifling compression of the unlucky 'man' we will see in a moment. To set out the whole detail would be tedious; but the reader with the three poems before him can easily satisfy himself.
