the doctrine of which is repeated in 241-2 of the same play, and in other passages in his dramas, notably in _Choephoroe_, 950-955, and in _Eumenides_, 495, συμφερει σωφρονειν ὑπο στενει. The fact that suffering and calamity have resulted in blessing is emphasized as strongly in the concluding drama of the Orestean Trilogy, the _Eumenides_, as it is in the _Œdipus Coloneus_. Again, when Professor Butcher says that “in Sophocles the divine righteousness asserts itself not in the award of happiness or misery to the individual, but in the providential wisdom which assigns to each individual his place and function in a universal moral order,” he says what it is very difficult to understand. Surely in the case of each one of the protagonists in Sophocles, to employ the word in its non-technical sense, their deserts are very exactly meted out. Antigone deliberately courts her fate by setting the law at defiance, though she knew what the penalty was, and falls, but has her compensation in the applause of her own conscience and “in the faith that looks through death.” Ajax paid the penalty, as the poet emphasizes, for brutality and impious insolence; Œdipus suffers for his impetuosity and intemperance, but, his punishment exceeding the offence, the balance is adjusted for him in final triumph over the sons who had wronged him, in procuring blessings for his protector, in the peace of the soul, and in a glorious death. Clytemnestra and Ægisthus well deserve their fate, as, in addition to committing their crime, they continue ostentatiously to glory in it. In the _Trachiniæ_ Hercules is punished for a base and cowardly murder, followed by an act of cruel and indiscriminate vengeance, retribution coming on him through the sister of the man thus murdered, and the daughter of the prince on whom this iniquitous vengeance had been wreaked, as Deianeira, but for Iole, would not have sent the poisoned tunic. Sophocles has even altered the legend to emphasize the guilt of Hercules. The _Philoctetes_, indeed, is the only play which lends any support to Professor Butcher’s statement. Here the gods undoubtedly condemn a man to a life of torture that their designs, irrespective of the individual, may be fulfilled, and that Troy may not fall before the appointed time; but how fully, how nobly is he compensated! It seems to us that the award of happiness and misery to the individual, in accordance with desert, is as conspicuous in the ethics of Sophocles as it is in the ethics of Shakespeare. And it is the more conspicuous, when we remember the hampering conditions under which Sophocles had to work, the limitations conventionally imposed on the treatment of the legends.