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christens A Greek Borgia in reference to the cool depravity of Menelaus' proceedings. The second of the four plays, known to readers of Euripides as the Helen but styled by Dr. Verrall, for sufficient reasons, Euripides' Apology, is treated in the essayist's most ingenious and imaginative style. The "sufficient reasons" are, briefly, these. The play is, in almost every point, not only unlike, but contradictory to, the normal mood of Euripides. There is not a word against the gods; on the contrary, they all seem to be doing their not very intelligent best. Helen herself is innocent, and, in pressing circumstances, retires into a nunnery, or, to be quite exact, "has taken up her abode in the late King Proteous' mausoleum." The phantom Helen, in recovering whom Menelaus has spent long years and spilled much blood, under the illusion that she is real, is eventually brought by him to Egypt, where the real Helen is guarding herself, by seclusion from the attentions of Theoclymenus, the late King Proteus' son. Thereon the phantom Helen, finding herself literally de trop, melts into air, after the necessary explanation: Menelaus and Helen borrow a ship by a ruse, from Theoclymenus, and depart for Greece, almost literally to the sound of wedding bells!

Nothing less like Euripides' other work and general attitude of mind can possibly be conceived: yet there is not the slightest ground for doubting its authorship, and some explanation of Euripides' unexpected recantation of his normal point of view is certainly required. Dr. Verrall has one, so ingeniously worked out as to be almost persuasive and yet almost as pure a piece of fantasy as the phantomHelen herself. To be brief, he thinks the Helen-or, as he calls it, Euripides' Apology-is a melodrama, a Midsummer Night's Dream, written at the request of a kind of ladies' college, in

connection with the festival of the Thesmophoria, and acted or recited before this female audience in an island (Macris or Helene) near the shores of Attica. Hence the unusual piety of the play, and the abnegation of the poet's tendency to misogyny, may be accounted for! What solid weight should be given to this ingenious speculation, iudicent lectores; but a more fascinating piece of constructive hypothesis and humorous guesswork we might go far to seek.

The third play, Heracles-re-named A Soul's Tragedy-is a very much grimmer piece of work, not only in the original but in the essayist's treatment of it. Euripides, he thinks, saw and sketched in Heracles a real case of a noble nature with a taint of insanity, breaking into a momentary and murderous frenzy. The delusions about his labors-only half-believed by himself— are thus accounted for from the Euripidian point of view, and subtly commented on by the essayist. Nothing, we think, in the Heracles, will quite justify the exordium with which Balaustion, in Aristophane's Apology, preludes her recitation of this drama:

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It is not a perfect piece: it is something less than that, but it is a very strong and interesting effort, in a field where perhaps only Eschylus and Shakespeare have fully succeeded.

The fourth and last play-Orestes, otherwise A Fire from Hell-is, we are told (Introd. p. xi), more read than any of the other three. The special dramatic popularity of the legends of the family of Agamemnon may account for this. The Orestes is a fine but lurid play, and presents the passion of revenge in an undoubtedly ugly and ferocious aspect. We are not clear that Euripides intended-as the essayist thinks he did-to describe Orestes as an infuriated young ruffian, totally

without character or scruple, and

Electra as a vixenish and ferocious old maid, maddened by the disgrace and disappointment of not having married! This last element in the case rouses no such emotion as Dr. Verrall feels against Euripides' Electra, when we meet it in the Electra of Sophocles. No doubt Euripides brings down emotions of this sort till they seem of the earth, earthy; that is his way, his mission, his mood. But Dr. Verrall views the passion of revenge, as exhibited by Orestes and Electra, after unexampled wrongs, not as of the earth, earthy, but as-well, in view of the title he has given to the play, let us say subterranean! It is the only case in which, amid all the ingenious audacities of his dramatic speculations, he seems momentarily to have lost the fine balance of his judgment.

We have indicated that the reviving fame of Euripides has owed, and is owing, much to an interpreter of genius: by the double good fortune already alluded to, he has met also with a translator of exceptional powers. Professor Murray has the advantage, which he shares with Dr. Verrall, of knowing the ground of Greek drama thoroughly, and also of writing exquisite English verse-translations, in which he does not fear to expand the letter, if thereby he can preserve the spirit, of a Greek choric ode or dramatic speech. Is it possible, e.g., to put the pathos of the Chorus' lament for the doomed Phaedra (Hippol. 11. 762-774) more truly and more powerfully than this?

And for that dark spell that about her clings,

Sick desires of forbidden things

The soul of her rend and sever;
The bitter tide of calamity
Hath risen above her lips; and she

Where bends she her last endeavor? She will hie her alone to her bridal

room,

And a rope swing slow in the rafters' gloom;

And a fair white neck shall creep to the noose,

A-shudder with dread, yet firm to choose

The one strait way for fame, and lose The Love and the pain for ever.

The farewell of Artemis to the dying Hippolytus-given by Professor Murray in the rhymed couplets which he prefers to blank verse as an equivalent for the Iambic measure-is excellent also:

Yea, and to thee, for this sore travail's sake,

Honors most high in Troezen will I make;

For yokeless maids before their bridal night

Shall shear for thee their tresses; and a rite

Of honoring tears be thine in ceaseless store;

And virgins' thoughts in music ever

more

Turn toward thee, and praise thee in the Song

Of Phaedra's far-famed love and thy great wrong.

And thou, Hippolytus, shrink not from the King,

Thy father. Thou wast born to bear this thing.

Farewell! I may not watch man's fleeting breath,

Nor stain mine eyes with the effluence of death.

And sure that Terror now is very near.

There is something in Mr. Gilbert Murray's verse which goes far beyond a happy knack of translator: διὰ Μούσας καὶ μετάρσιος ᾔξεν would perhaps be the verdict of Euripides, borrowing a phrase of his own, on his translator.

Euripides has suffered, in life and in death, from irrational enmities and inevitable misunderstandings. Not without friction and unpopularity can any writer habitually controvert the professed creed-however lightly held-of the national audience: such a position

leads to bitterness and to exile, literal or spiritual. But when the excellent mockery of Aristophanes-which is commonly taken as far more serious and malicious than it was intended to be has said its say and laughed its laugh, the real rank of Euripides as a poet must be sought otherwhere. great dramatic poets of the world should not be ranked as in a class-list, but viewed as a cluster of stars. Is there any reasonable canon or criterion by which Euripides can be exThe Church Quarterly.

The

cluded from their company? Let the great modern poet whose appreciation has done so much for the renewal of Euripides' fame, speak the reconciling word:

He lies now in the little valley, laughed And moaned about by those mysteri

ous streams,

Boiling and freezing, like the love and hate

Which helped or harmed him through his earthly course.

They mix in Arethousa by his grave. E. D. A. Morshead.

THE ENEMY'S CAMP. CHAPTER XIV.

It was all Aunt Charlotte's fault. Agatha decided subsequently. The adventure would never have occurred if she had not been so heavily laden. Nor would it have happened at all but for the removal. This feat had, it is true, been accomplished at a very early hour, but its effects threatened long continuance. All the morning after they had reached the new spot the atmosphere had been even more unrestful than before, what with the pitching of tents, unpacking of hampers, disposition of furniture and so forth. Cicely had contributed a few suggestions that she imagined to be useful, and had then strolled off into the wood whence she did not emerge till luncheon. Doris had again proffered her assistance but had only succeeded in putting a camp-bed together in a fashion that suggested a tentative attempt on the part of some fakir to break himself by slow degrees of the habit of sleeping on spikes. Mr. Lauriston had more wisely disappeared till lunch, when he made an unfortunate comparison to spring-cleaning.

"Spring-cleaning indeed!" Mrs. Lauriston had replied. "As if that affected

you! You go out in the morning and it is done by the time you come back again."

"If it was done" he had hazarded and then stopped. On the subject of spring-cleaning the sexes have not yet attained to a perfect equality of vision.

Conversation had languished from that point. Cicely had been unusually silent and depressed-with her the natural result of travelling.

Doris had absorbed herself in contemplation of the view, unconscious of Mrs. Lauriston's half-pitying and halfscornful eye; Miss Yonge would for the future be permanently associated with the camp-bed's mutilated form in Aunt Charlotte's mind. Mrs. Lauriston had no eyes for the scenery as yet. This new camp on the right bank of the back-water, securely hidden in a bay of meadow carved out of the woods through which the river ran, only appealed to her as a safe retreat from the criminal population of the house-boat. She appreciated it how. ever to some extent because it had to be made tidy, the ground having apparently been very much neglcted for a long time.

Lunch over she had leisure to consider her menu for the evening meal, and decided on making a raspberry and currant tart. But in departing at such short notice she had omitted to replenish her larder fully, and amongst other ingredients lacking to the dish were the raspberries and the currants. This was a pity because, though she could still procure such things from the farm which had supplied her lower down, the way was longer, and Mrs. Lauriston remembered the last occasion on which she had purchased fruit there. She had ordered and paid for three pounds, had paid in advance, so trustful had she become from contact with nature. The fruit had been brought down by the farmer's boy, and only two pounds and twelve ounces had arrived. Mrs. Lauriston harbored dark suspicions. She recalled the strange behavior of the Ealing greengroceries; some of them, carrots for instance, or turnips or potatoes, varied not between counter and kitchen, but in the case of plums and greengages a diminution in quantity was often noticed to have taken place, the shrinkage being roughly proportionate to the distance of the greengrocer of the moment. Mrs. Lauriston had brought her scales into the country. She always weighed everything on arrival, a proceeding which had caused frequent changes in the personnel of her greengrocers.

So it had come about that Agatha had been consulted, had volunteered to replenish the stores in person, and was returning with a very full basket and rather later than she had intended. The fruit had had to be picked, for which she had not calculated in estimating the time. They manage these things better in Ealing. Therefore it occurred to her that she would take a short cut across a field to the river.

Now no practised pedestrian is ever guilty of the short cut, at least in the

country. There are still to be found a few potential poets who preserve their illusions and attempt the hazardous venture in traversing the town. But even in wildest Soho there is hope of a policeman or at least of an intelligent native who may be able to speak enough English to save the rash adventurer. There is also, it is said, a possibility of proceeding more or less straight from one point to another in Ealing. But in the country the habit of the short cut is soon killed or kills. There is no policeman and the native is not intelligent. Therefore, though the road present zig-zags never SO tempting, the experienced do not turn aside.

But Agatha, though vaguely aware of the risk, knew that the field was square, and that the path ran round two sides of it, the river making the third. To walk across it in a diagonal line was mathematically justifiable, and Agatha was skilled in accounts. She got over the stile, basket and all, and advanced out into the field.

And then she perceived her error, too late; not lightly or without reason had the wise elders of time afore bent that path firmly askew. For within the field she encountered a brindled cow: she noticed that it had a crumpled horn. The elder Miss Neave was not afraid of cows in theory. She did not carry her good wishes towards them so far as to pat them dubiously on the neck with a gloved hand, as Cicely had been known to do. But she considered them as useful animals which should be disregarded socially and left to their own business, the production of cream and butter. Accordingly she did not turn back but went on with courage despite the crumpled horn. She ignored the cow, assuming precisely the expression that she was wont to employ when she met on the same pavement an undesirable ex-acquaintance.

The cow, however, lacked the advantages of the knowledge of suburban etiquette that Ealing affords. It should have endeavored to put on the same air of lofty abstraction and pass Agatha by as though she had been a mere vegetable, an inedible vegetable. But this was a country cow, affably disposed to strangers and with an affability increased by isolation. It saw in Agatha a possible dairy-maid, and milking time was at hand. It approached her, purposefully deliberate.

The elder Miss Neave drew back a little; the undesirable ex-acquaintance showed signs of compelling recognition. The natural course would be to cross the street with the same careful inattention. But there was no street to cross, only a river which did not supply bridges at sufficiently short intervals to solve social difficulties of this nature. She simply made a wider curve towards the bank hoping the cow would take the hint. But the cow was not used to being gracefully cut, it misunderstood the manoeuvre and followed; it wanted to be petted at least if not milked. It had a very limited social circle, which it divided roughly into bipeds without skirts which drove it about with a stick and bipeds with skirts which said soft things to it, carried pails, and sat on three-legged stools. The first class it avoided, the second it cultivated; to be itself avoided was a new experi

ence.

The cow hesitated in thoughtful curiosity. To show that she was quite at her ease Agatha put up her parasol, edging a little more towards the bank; she did not want to frighten the poor animal from its pasture, and she hoped for the best. So did the cow; it had never seen a dairy-maid with a parasol and was justly suspicious of the innovation.

There had however been some new machinery on the farm, and this

might possibly be a new kind of pail or a patent stool; the cow took an intelligent interest in such things and it came nearer and mooed as if to ask an explanation.

She

Agatha looked hurriedly round. could not cross any more metaphorical pavements; but as a last resource the undesirable ex-acquaintance may be evaded by going into a shop. Here there were no shops, but there were trees. One especially, a large tumbledown willow, was close beside her and it seemed easy to climb up into that crevice which showed where it had at some time or other been split by lightning. All other retreat was now impossible. Agatha might have tried violence, but then so might the COW. It was brindled and had a crumpled horn. She knew that there was nothing to be afraid of, no, nothing of course. But if you go into a shop it must be a very pertinacious exacquaintance that will follow you or wait for your exit. So without indecorous haste she put down the basket and the parasol and stepped up into the tree. She could not ascend more than a few feet; indeed she was hardly out of the reach of the crumpled horn. But of course this was not a real flight; it was merely the strongest hint she could give.

The cow halted. No dairy-maid in its experience had ever given that kind of hint, though the smaller bipeds that hit it with a stick were wont to do odd things of a like nature in their spare moments. The matter deserved consideration and the COW considered. Then it bent its head cautiously as though to cull a reflective blade of grass and sniffed at the parasol--a birthday present from Aunt Charlotte which had been bought at the sales and was really worth two guineas. But apparently the cow did not think much of the parasol; it withdrew its head abruptly in sudden mistrust, as though

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