between the two chief persons, Dêanira and Heracles. To one passion of
his, to one fond mistake of hers, the ruin of them both is due. Her
love has made their fates inseparable. And the spectator, in sharing
Hyllus' grief, is afflicted for them both at once. We may well
recognize in this treatment of the death of Heracles the hand of him
who wrote--

[Greek:
su kai dikaiôn adikous
phrenas paraspas epi lôba,
..., ...
amachos gar empaizei theos Aphrodita[3].]

7. It is unnecessary to expatiate here on the merits of construction
in which these seven plays are generally acknowledged to be
unrivalled; the natural way in which the main situation is explained,
the suddenness and inevitableness of the complications, the steadily
sustained climax of emotion until the action culminates, the
preservation of the fitting mood until the end, the subtlety and
effectiveness of the minor contrasts of situation and character[4].

But it may not be irrelevant to observe that the 'acting qualities' of
Sophocles, as of Shakespeare, are best known to those who have seen
him acted, whether in Greek, as by the students at Harvard[5] and
Toronto[6], and more recently at Cambridge[7], or in English long ago
by Miss Helen Faucit (since Lady Martin[8]), or still earlier and
repeatedly in Germany, or in the French version of the Antigone by MM.
Maurice and Vacquerie (1845) or of King Oedipus by M. Lacroix, in
which the part of OEdipe Roi was finely sustained by M. Geoffroy in
1861, and by M. Mounet Sully in 1881[9]. With reference to the latter