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54 the genuine poet being always in advance of his fellow-men, and therefore frequently misunderstood or undervalued by them. The era of Dante is as deeply stamped, both on his prose and verse, as if he had designed to portray it. He belonged partly to a period that was passing away, and partly to one that was near at hand. Trained in the lore of the schoolmen, he has something in common with Duns Scotus and the Master of Sentences; while by his homage to Virgil and Statius, he anticipated in his tastes the revival of classical literature. Milton, affected by the influence of Jonson and Fletcher, composed in his youth a masque and songs of Arcady; in his mature manhood, the serious and severe Independent is manifest in all he wrote. Schiller is the herald of a revolutionary period, impatient of and discontented with the present. Pope, in his moral essays and satires, represents a time when sense and decorum ranked among the cardinal virtues, and when loftier and more robust forms of imagination or faith were accounted extravagances. To this general law Euripides was no exception. He went before them, and so was misinterpreted by many among whom he lived. Within half a century after his death, his name stood foremost on the roll of Greek dramatic poets. If not a deeper, a more genial spirit—a spirit we constantly meet with in Euripidean plays—had superseded the grim theology of the Marathonian period; stage-poetry was indeed shorn of some of its grandeur, but it gained, in recompense for what it lost, profounder human feelings.

That the Athenian theatre was not only a national