some admirable poetry, or some effective scenes and situations.
In the "Phœnician Women," Euripides displays some of his greatest defects in the construction of a tragedy, and some of his most conspicuous beauties as a pathetic and picturesque writer. As to its plot, it is cumbrous; and, what is still worse, he competes in it with the "Antigone" of Sophocles and the "Seven against Thebes" of Æschylus. Jocasta, who in "Œdipus the King" destroys herself, is alive again in this drama. The brothers, whose rivalry and death by each other's hand were familiar to all, repeat their duel, and the devotion of Antigone to her blind father and her younger brother is brought or rather crammed into it at the end. We have, in fact, almost a trilogy pressed into a single member of it, and in consequence the "Phœnician Women" is, with the exception of the "Œdipus at Colonus," the longest of extant Greek tragedies. Euripides forgot the sound advice given by the poetess Corinna to her youthful rival, Pindar. He had been, she thought, too profuse in his mythological stories, and therefore advised him for the future "to sow with the hand and not with the sack."
As the story of the "Phœnician Women" has in the main been already told in the volume of this series devoted to Æschylus, and also as many English readers are acquainted with the "Frères Ennemis" of Racine, it is not perhaps necessary to detail again the tale of Eteocles and Polynices. It will suffice to present a portion of one or two scenes, so as to give some idea of the pure ore that lies embedded in this tragical
