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44 the wives of the slain weeping for their husbands denied burial; or that bloody meadow before the seven-gated Thebes strewn with the dead in your 'Phœnicians'—little then thought we that these mimic shows were but shadows of what we beheld on the banks of the Asinarus on that dreary October morning, when, faint and worn by our night-march, and maddened by thirst, captain and soldier, hoplite and peltast, we rushed into its stream, careless of the archers that lined its banks, and hardly recking of the iron sleet that struck down our best and bravest. By the magic of your song, though 'sung in a strange land,' we poor survivors were rescued and redeemed from graves and the prison-house, from hunger and nakedness, from the burning sun and the sharp night-frosts of autumn, and from what was as hard to bear, the scoffs of the insolent foe gazing down upon us from mom to eve, and aggravating by brutal taunts and ribald jests the pains of the living and the terrors of the dying." If the character of Euripides may be inferred from his writings, the most pathetic of Greek tragic poets—he who sympathised with the slave, he who so tenderly depicted women—wept at such moments with those who were weeping before him, and was cheered by these proofs that he had not written or lived in vain.

The "Orestes" was the last play exhibited at Athens by Euripides; and he must have quitted that city shortly afterwards, if he was in exile for two years. He was a self-banished man; at least no cause is assigned for his departure. Of the three great dramatic