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II.] troubles, harassed by adverse criticism, cut to the heart by the miseries which befell his unhappy city in her protracted wars.

But, far deeper than these personal griefs, there lay upon his spirit the constant melancholy of unsolved doubts, of unsettled problems, of seeking for the light in vain, and of hoping against hope for the moral reformation of mankind. Hence our beautiful extant busts and statue represent him worthily as the "poet of the world's grief"—gentle, subdued, and full of sorrowing sympathy. Nor is there any authentic portrait left us from the great days of Athens so interesting or so thoroughly cosmopolitan as that of the poet Euripides.

16. Innumerable attempts have been made to gather from his writings an estimate of his politics, his social principles, and his religion. The ancients have here led the way, and, considering the dramatic poet always as a moral teacher, have assumed that the declarations of the poet's characters were meant to convey his own opinions. But such an inference must be thoroughly unsafe in the case of an essentially dramatic author, who paints upon the stage, not only the violence of human passion, but the conflicts of hostile principles—the mixed good and evil in every aspect of human society. There are, indeed, very few broad assertions on social questions in his plays which cannot be contradicted by assertions in other plays or in altered situations. Even the Athenian public seem to have forgotten that a dramatic poet must speak in character. Thus Plutarch tells us about the Ixion, that the audience cried out against a passage in which wealth was praised above virtue, and that the piece would have been hissed down had not the poet rushed on the scene and bid them have patience to see the punishment consequent on such principles. Whether the story be true or false of the Attic audience, it is certainly applicable to the narrow and stupid criticisms of later writers. For example, had the famous line in the