pale, majestic, heavily-draped
figure of Sophocles himself. Slowly, solemnly, and with bent head, he
passed up the hall, between two ranks of spectators as silent as
himself; raised his eyes as he confronted the priest,[36] and announced
to him, that since Euripides was "dead to-day," and as a fitting
spectacle for the god, his chorus would appear at the greater feast,
next month, clothed in black and ungarlanded. Then silently, and amidst
silence, he passed out again.

This, then, was the purport of the important news which was known to
have arrived in port, but which every one had interpreted in his own
way. Euripides was no more! But neither the news nor he who brought it
could create more than a momentary stupor; and the tipsy fun soon
renewed itself, at the expense of the living tragedian and the dead.
Aristophanes alone remained grave. The value of the man whom he had
aspersed and ridiculed stood out before him summed up by the hand of
Death. He recalled the failure which had marked the now hopeless
limitation of his own genius, and those last words addressed to him by
Euripides which brought home its lesson.[37] The archon, "Master of the
Feast," judging that its "glow" was "extinct," had risen to conclude it
by crowning the parting cup. He had crowned it with judicious reserve to
the "Good Genius;" and Strattis (the comic poet) had burst forth in an
eulogium of the Comic Muse which claimed the title of Good Genius for
her--when yielding to this new and over-mastering impulse, he
(Aristophanes) checked the coming applause, and demanded that the Tragic
Muse and her ministrant Euripides should receive the libation instead;
justifying the demand by a noble and pathetic tribute to the memory of
the dead poet, and to the great humanities which only the _tragic_ poet
can represent.

But he found no response. The listeners mistook his seriousness for
satire, and broke out afresh at the excellence of such a joke; and
recovering his presence of mind as quickly as he had lost it, he changed
his tone, thanked those alike who had laughed with him, and who had
wept with the "Lord of Tears;" and desired that the cup be consecrated
to that genius of complex poetry which is tragedy and comedy in one. It
was sacrilege, he declared, to part these two; for to do so was to hack
at the Hermai[38]--to outrage the ideal union of the intellectual and
the sensuous life in man. And from this new vantage-ground he launched
another bolt a