Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1896) v2.djvu/28

the top of their voices" the speeches, monodies, and choruses, especially that beginning, "O Love, thou despot over Gods and men!" It was not a transient excitement: it lasted for months, until, in fact, the winter came, and a keen frost cooled their fevered blood.

When "Greece led her conqueror captive," it was Euripides whom Roman poets, orators, and philosophers delighted to honour, Ennius, Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, are but the greatest among a host of his admirers. As Verrall puts it,—"The most cultivated men of the ancient world speak of Euripides regularly and habitually as modest men would now speak of Shakspeare or Goethe, and sometimes as reverent men would now speak of Dante or St. Paul." The early Christian Fathers quoted him with approval. He was for them the chief witness for righteousness, the purest teacher of morality, amongst the ancients; in some sort, a forerunner of Christianity.^[1] A sacred drama, "Christ's Passion," was composed by some early Father, of passages taken from various plays of Euripides. In the Middle Ages, Dante knew, or cared to recognize, Euripides alone of the three. To Milton's love and minute critical study of him we owe the Comus and the Samson Agonistes. It is only since the beginning of the present century that a new school of criticism, of German origin, has arisen, which, not content with exalting Aeschylus and Sophocles far above him, has spared no pains to depreciate Euripides. It can hardly be said that the detractors have carried the poets with them. Goethe indignantly cried: "If a modern like Schlegel must pick out faults in so great an ancient, he ought only to do it upon his knees." Coleridge said, "Certainly Euripides was a greater poet in the abstract than Sophocles." Macaulay, who in his salad days carped at him, in his maturity wrote: "I can hardly account for the contempt which, at school and college, I felt for