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V.] questionings. But it is remarkable that where the struggle is about a new cult, the old men of the play, Cadmus and Teiresias, are the only persons ready to embrace strange and violent rites, in the performance of which they even make themselves ridiculous. It is not impossible that among the half-educated Macedonian youth, with whom literature was coming into fashion, the poet may have met a good deal of that insolent second-hand scepticism which is so offensive to a deep and serious thinker, and he may have wished to show them that he was not, as they doubtless hailed him, the apostle of this random speculative arrogance.

59. This kind of play then—an episode, or a number of episodes from a legend—was most properly introduced by a prologue, bringing the story up to the moment when the action began. It was almost as often concluded by the appearance of a deity, who calmed the disputes, or when the excitement of deep passions did not admit of any prompt and peaceful solution, assured the requital of the actors. But I here only indicate what will be again treated when we come to speak of the lesser features of the tragedies. It seems from the quotations of the ancients as well as from the imitations of moderns, that this was not the highest and most successful class of Euripides' plays; and it has, moreover, lost far more than the rest by the impossibility of reproducing the musical effects, which must have been a capital feature in the lyrical expressions of lamentation or wild excitement. The tendency of the modern drama is foreign to such simple construction without prominence either of intrigue or character. We may nevertheless find specimens, not only in the Italian opera, which perhaps best represents them, but in such plays as Wallenstein's Lager of Schiller, a play to which the spurious Rhesus of Euripides bears some resemblance.

60. The Cyclops.—I can find no fitter place than this to say a word about the Cyclops, which is exceptionally interesting as the only extant relic of the