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is surely a little superficial to characterize this feature of his genius as "a fondness for sophistical reasoning," or to claim that noble diction is sacrificed and the ideal "large utterance" marred, because the war between right and wrong is fought out with disciplined forces. Sophocles was hardly of one mind with the latter-day critics who carp at this practice of Euripides. In four out of his seven plays he has what would be called "forensic debates," were they found in Euripides;^[1] and in five he has the same kind of "wrangling dialogues" of which we have heard so much from the detractors of the younger poet.^[2]

Attitude to Religion.In the mythological representations of the Gods we can find little indeed that is essentially ideal. Had the epic poets not thrown around that Pantheon of lust, of mutual jealousy and contention, the glamour of stately verse, these forms which gleamed luridly against the heavy clouds of superstition and nature-worship might have faded like evil dreams with the first dawn of the intellectual day of Greece. But the poets imparted to men's conceptions of the Gods a precision and harmony, an aesthetic beauty and verisimilitude, which gave them a new, an almost indefinite lease of life, so that even we moderns find it easier to imagine the actual being of Apollo and Aphroditê than of the Gods of our fathers, Odin and Freya. As subjects for poetry and art they became wholly satisfying; for purposes of ritual and public worship they were conventionally adequate. The difficulty was felt when men asked, "What are the eternal powers that make for righteousness?—who are the sleepless provi-