But the complete vindication of the fact that Balaustion and Mrs. Browning and our own women of to-day are on the right side in their appreciation of Euripides as the great woman's poet of antiquity is found in the opinion of our contemporary critic, Gilbert Murray, who more than thirty years after these poems were written writes of the "wonderful women-studies by which Euripides dazzled and aggrieved his contemporaries. They called him a hater of women; and Aristophanes makes the women of Athens conspire for revenge against him. Of course he was really the reverse. He loved and studied and expressed the women whom the Socratics ignored and Pericles advised to stay in their rooms. Crime, however, is always more striking and palpable than virtue. Heroines like Medea, Phaedra, Stheneboia, Aërope, Clytemnestra, perhaps fill the imagination more than those of the angelic or devoted type--Alcestis, who died to save her husband, Evadne and Laodamia, who could not survive theirs, and all the great list of virgin-martyrs. But the significant fact is that, like Ibsen, Euripides refuses to idealize any man, and does idealize women. There is one youth-martyr, Menoikeus in the 'Phænissae,' but his martyrdom is a masculine, businesslike performance--he gets rid of his prosaic father by a pretext about traveling money without that shimmer of loveliness that hangs over the virgins." Where then did Euripides find these splendid women of force and character? It seems quite impossible that he could have evolved them out of his own inner consciousness. He must have known women who served at least, in part, as models. Besides, there was undoubtedly a new woman movement in the air or Plato in his "Republic" would not have suggested a plan for educating men and women alike. The free women of Athens are known in some cases to have attained a high degree of culture. Aspasia, who became the wife of Pericles, is a shining example. There was Sappho, also, with her school of poetry attended by girls in Lesbos. Taking all these facts into consideration, it would seem that Browning was sufficiently justified in drawing such a woman as Balaustion, and that a woman of her penetrating intellect and ardor of spirit would love Euripides, and dislike Aristophanes, seems absolutely certain. Therefore, if the historical attitude is taken toward Balaustion and her criticism and appreciation, it can be on the whole accepted as reflecting what would probably be the feeling of an ardent woman-follower of Euripides in his own day. But, on the other hand, if the criticism be taken as Browning's own, it is open to question whether it is partisan rather than entirely broad-minded. Take the consensus of opinion of modern critics and we find them all agreed in regard to the genius of Aristophanes, though admitting that his coarseness must, at times, detract from their enjoyment of him.