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or in sore straits, or under dæmonic influence: there are no such gratuitously wicked characters as Goneril, Lady Macbeth, or Tamora. Yet no one calls Shakspeare a misogynist. Why then was it possible for Euripides' enemies to charge him with being one, a charge doubtless echoed by a good many thoughtless and stupid people in his day, but little creditable to modern scholarship? For three reasons:—first, the wilful or obtuse misunderstanding of such characters as Phædra: the representation of these by Euripides was the main ground on which Aristophanes alleged that the tendency of his plays was immoral. Secondly, we occasionally come upon censures of the faults and foibles of women—their proneness to scandal, to uncharitable judgments of their fellows, their pettiness, frivolity, and so forth. It must be admitted, too, that the context sometimes justifies us in concluding that the poet is uttering his own sentiments. It was indeed to be expected that a thinker who had so high a conception of what women might be should be painfully impressed by the contrast presented by what they too often were. Nor is it matter for wonder that he should take opportunities of bringing the same feeling home to them. It is not enough to set noble ideals before people who are not yet conscious of the incompatibility of their present habits and aims with the emulation of those ideals. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, as indeed these were, compared with the hideous presentments of female morality in which Aristophanes revels, till his readers might imagine that pure and temperate women were quite the exception in the Athens of his day. And was not he a friend to women who gave, for the sake of his sisters for whom heroic ideals might seem set too high, this winsome model, "not too fair and good for human nature's daily food?"—