Pp. 19, 20, l. 328 ff., Admetus’s speech.]—­If the last speech made us know Alcestis, this makes us know Admetus fully as well.  At one time the beauty and passion of it almost make us forget its ultimate hollowness; at another this hollowness almost makes us lose patience with its beautiful language.  In this state of balance the touch of satire in l. 338 f. ("My mother I will know no more,” etc.), and the fact that he speaks immediately after the complete sincerity of Alcestis, conspire to weigh 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 in lyrics, never in ordinary dialogue.  This is very significant, and clearly right.