which Admetus pretends to fear, he would have shown us at least some one person actually so maintaining it. But in fact he assumes and implies that every one then would think what in a case unprejudiced every one now would think. The obvious, natural, and only permissible course for the master of the house was to acquaint his friend and visitor with the facts as they really were; and whether after that the visitor stayed or went, whether he took his meal in that house or the next, was a thing indifferent, to be settled between the parties according to their mutual feelings, but not touching the duty or affecting the character of either in the slightest degree. And indeed we see that even Admetus, when he has to face not his obsequious inferiors but Heracles, does not venture to make this plea a part of his apology, but says merely that to let the visitor go elsewhere would have been painful to himself, a needless addition to the grief of his bereavement[1]. I will not waste the time of the reader, by explaining what he doubtless perceives, that in this altered form the excuse is still as vain as ever, or worse, involving the same false assumption about the facts, the same evasion of the issue, and adding fresh absurdity at which we have full liberty to laugh. Only fancy the widower 'weeping' as he pictures himself 'not only' because his wife was dead 'but also' because the cup and plate of his friend were being filled by the slaves of some other Pheraean!
The common attempt therefore, to educe a unity and moral for the play from the nobleness of Admetus as a host, can as little be approved or allowed as the attempt of Browning to introduce a unity and moral by ennobling the conception of Heracles. The 'hospitality' of Admetus is an offence, which he is compelled to confess, and for which his real motives, since those which he chooses to allege are neither credible nor intelligible, must be supposed such as he does not care to avow. But although he does not avow them, they may nevertheless be discoverable or even obvious: and so we shall find that they are, if, putting aside all presumptions about what Euripides must have meant and therefore should or should not have said, we will but attend to what he does say, and allow ourselves to learn what he did mean. But for this purpose we must quit for the
- ↑ v. 1039.
