mode of handling tragedy. Unlike Sophocles, who only limited
the activity of the chorus, he disconnected it from the tragic
interest of the drama by giving but little attention to the
character of its songs. He also made some other changes; and,
as one writer expresses it, his innovations "disintegrated the
drama by destroying its artistic unity." But although perhaps
inferior, in all artistic point of view, to his predecessors,
the genius of Euripides supplied a want that they did not meet.
Although his plays are all connected with the history and mythology
of Greece, in them rhetoric is more prominent than in the plays
of either AEschylus or Sophocles; the legendary characters assume
more the garb of humanity; the tender sentiments--love, pity,
compassion--are invoked to a greater degree, and an air of exquisite
delicacy and refinement embellishes the whole. These were the
qualities in the plays of Euripides that endeared him to the
Greeks of succeeding ages, and that gave to his works such an
influence on the Roman and modern drama.

Of Euripides MR. SYMONDS remarks: "His lasting title to fame
consists in his having dealt with the deeper problems of life
in a spirit which became permanent among the Greeks, so that
his poems never lost their value as expressions of current
philosophy. Nothing strikes the student of later Greek literature
more strongly than this prolongation of the Euripidean tone of
thought and feeling. In the decline of tragic poetry the literary
sceptre was transferred to comedy; and the comic playwrights may
be described as the true successors of Euripides. The dialectic
method, which he affected, was indeed dropped, and a more
harmonious form of art than the Euripidean was created for comedy
by Menan'der, when the Athenians, after passing through their