of Aeschylus. He appeals more to pity. His art is more subtle,
especially in the treatment, for which he is famous, of the irony of
fate. In politics, social sentiment, and religion, while he is more of
the generation of Pericles than Aeschylus, he is still conservative
and orthodox. If he belongs to democracy, it is a democracy still kept
within moral bounds, and owning a master in its great chief, with whom
he seems to have been personally connected. Nor does he ever court
popularity by bringing the personages of the heroic age down to the
common level. He, as well as Aeschylus, is dear to Aristophanes, the
satiric poet of conservatism, while Euripides is hateful.

Euripides (B.C. 480-406) perhaps slightly resembles Voltaire in this,
that he belongs to a different historic zone from his two
predecessors, from Sophocles as well as from Aeschylus, in political
and social sentiment, though not in date. He belongs to a full-blown
democracy, and is evidently the dramatic poet of the people. To please
the people he lays dignity and stateliness aside, brings heroic
characters down to a common level, and introduces characters which are
unheroic. He gives the people plenty of passion, especially of
feminine passion, without being nice as to its sources, or rejecting
such stories as those of Phaedra and Medea, which would have been
alien to the taste, not only of Aeschylus, but of Sophocles. He gives
them plenty of politics, plenty of rhetoric, plenty of discussion,
political and moral, plenty of speculation, which in those days was
novel, now and then a little scepticism. His "Alcestis" is melodrama
verging on sentimental comedy, and heralding the sentimental comedy of
Menander known to us in the versions of Terence. The chord of pathos
he can touch well. His degradation, as the old school thought it, of
the drama of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and what they deemed his
pandering to vulgar taste, brought upon him the bitter satire of