of comparative barbarism, lightlessness; behind which, indeed, there were rumors of a much higher Past.  These great Greeks, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, brought in ideas which were as old as the hills in Egypt, or in India; but which were new to the Greece of their time—­of historic times; they were, I think, as far as their own country was concerned, innovators and revealers; not voicers of a traditional wisdom; it may have been traditional once, but that time was much too far back for memory.  I think we should have to travel over long, long ages, to get to a time when Eleusis was a really effective link with the Lodge—­to a period long before Homer, long before Troy fell.—­But to return to the story of Alcestis:—­

You might take it on some lofty impersonal plane, and find a symbol in it; Aeschylus would have done so, somehow; though I do not quite see how.  Sophocles would have been aware of nothing wrong in it; he would have taken it quite as a matter of course.  Euripides saw clearly that Admetus was a selfish poltroon, and rubbed it in for all he was worth.  And he could not leave it at that, either; but for pity’s sake must bring in Hercules at the end to win back Alcestis from death.  So the play is great-hearted and tender, and a covert lash for conventional callousness; and somehow does not quite hang together:—­leaves you just a little uncomfortable.  Browning calls him, in Balaustion’s Adventure,

     “....  Euripides
     The human, with his droppings of warms tears”;

—­it is a just verdict, perhaps.  Without Aeschylus’ Divine Wisdom, or Sophocles’ worldly wisdom, he groped perpetually after some means to stay the downward progress of things; he could not thunder like the one, nor live easily and let live, like the other.—­I do not give you these scraps of criticism (which are not my own, but borrowed always I think), for the sake of criticism; but for the sake of history;—­understand them, and you have the story of the age illumined.  You can read the inner Athens here, in the aspirations and in the limitations of Euripides, and in the contempt in which Athens held him; as you can read it in the grandeur of Aeschylus, and the Athenian acceptance of, and then reaction against, him; and in the character of Sophocles and his easy relations with his age.  When Euripides came, the light of the Gods had gone.  He was blindish; he would not accept the Gods without question.  Yet was he on the side of the Gods whom he could not see or understand; we must count him on their side, and loved by them.  He was not panoplied, like Aeschylus or Milton, in their grim and shining armor; yet what armor he wore bore kindred proud dints from the hellions’ batterings.  Or perhaps mostly he wore such marks as wounds upon his own flesh. . . .  Not even a total lack of humor, which I suppose must be attributed to him, can make him appear less than a most sympathetic, an heroic figure.  He was the child and fruitage