maidens noblest of soul.

"He brought before them women in all the relations of life, everywhere
surpassing the men in goodness, in constancy, in wisdom, in counsel.
They watched the ministering angel who sat by a brother's bed, and wiped
the dew of agony from his brow and the foam of madness from his lips;
they held their breath while a gentle-hearted priestess bemoaned to her
unknown brother the cruel destiny which even then drew her to the verge
of fratricide. They saw the wife who hailed a death of fire to be
reunited to her slain lord, and the wife who devoted herself to save, or
die with, her husband. They heard one mother plead the cause of honor
and right against cold statecraft; they listened as another besought her
doomed sons to be reconciled. They thrilled beholding the princess-slave
whose love was stronger than death and whose highborn spirit flashed
defiance to a treacherous foe; and that other, who, remembering her
hero-husband, would not suffer the imminent death to make herself or
her children play a craven part, but mingled proud scorn of the
murderous usurper with regrets for hopes foregone. In the noble words of
Professor Mahaffy: 'These are the women who have so raised the ideal of
the sex, that in looking upon them the world has passed from neglect to
courtesy, from courtesy to veneration; these are they, who, across many
centuries, first of frivolity and sensuality, then of rudeness and
barbarism, join hands with the ideals of our religion and our chivalry,
the martyred saints, the chaste and holy virgins of romance--nay, more,
with the true wives, the devoted mothers, of our own day.'

"But there are female characters in his plays which have been pointed to
as proving a very different attitude toward women. Of these, Phaedra was
the best-abused by his enemies, who wilfully shut their eyes to her true
character. She is, by the very plot of the play, the helpless victim of
the malice of a goddess. With her brain beclouded by fever frenzy, she
agonizes for clear vision and wails for peace of mind. She is a
pure-souled, true-hearted woman, who tingles with shame and shudders
with horror at the hideous thing that has been born in her. She is
driven by the imminence of ruin to a desperate expedient to shield her
name from the unmerited dishonor which she might well believe, from the
ambiguously worded threat with which Hippolytus departed, was to be cast
upon her. He gave her cause to think that he w