down the scale against Admetus. There can be no doubt that he means, and
means passionately, all that he says. Only he could not quite manage to
die when it was not strictly necessary.

P. 20, l. 355, If Orpheus' voice were mine.]--The bard and prophet,
Orpheus, went down to the dead to win back his wife, Eurydice. Hades and
Persephone, spell-bound by his music, granted his prayer that Eurydice
should return to the light, on condition that he should go before her,
harping, and should never look back to see if she was following. Just at
the end of the journey he looked back, and she vanished. The story is told
with overpowering beauty in Vergil's fourth Georgic.

P. 21, l. 367, Oh, not in death from thee Divided.]--Parodied in
Aristophanes' _Archarnians_ 894, where it is addressed to an eel, and
the second line ends "in a beet-root fricassee." See on l. 182.

P. 23, l. 393 ff., The Little Boy's speech.]--Classical Greek sculpture
and vase-painting tended to represent children not like children but like
diminutive men; and something of the sort is true of Greek tragedy.
The stately tragic convention has in the main to be maintained; the child
must speak a language suited for heroes, or at least for high poetry.
The quality of childishness has to be indicated by a word or so of
child-language delicately admitted amid the stateliness. Here we have
[Greek: maia], something like "mummy," at the beginning, and [Greek:
neossos], "chicken" or "little bird," at the end. Otherwise most of the
language is in the regular tragic diction, and some of it doubtless seems
to us unsuitable for a child. If Milton had had to make a child speak in
_Paradise Lost_, what sort of diction would he have given it?

The success or ill-success of such an attempt as this to combine the two
styles, the heroic and the childlike, depends on questions of linguistic
tact, and can hardly be judged with any confidence by foreigners. But I
think we can see Euripides here, as in other places, reaching out at an
effect which was really beyond the resources of his art, and attaining a
result which, though clearly imperfect, is strangely moving. He gets great
effects from the use of children in several tragedies, though he seldom
lets them speak. They speak in the _Medea_, the _Andromache_,
and _Suppliants_, and are mute figures in the _Trojan Women,
Hecuba, Heracles_, and _Iphigenia in Aulis_. We may notice that
where his children do speak, they speak only