scenes, the mastery of that most wonderful of Greek dramatic instruments, the Chorus. Plays had practically ceased to be written. They were thought of either as rhetorical exercises or as spectacles for the amphitheatre. Something similar happened to the whole inward spirit in which he worked, call it philosophy or call it religion. Its meaning became obscured. It had indeed a powerful influence on the philosophers of the great fourth century schools: they probably understood at least one side of him. But the sayings of his that are quoted broadcast and repeated through author after author of the decadence are mostly thoughts of quite the second rank, which have lost half their value by being torn from their context, often commonplace, often--as is natural in fragments of dramas--mutually contradictory, though almost always simply and clearly expressed. It was this clear expression which the late Greeks valued so highly. "Clarity"--_saphêneia_--was the watchword of style in Euripides' own day and remained always the foremost aim of Greek rhetoric. Indeed what a Greek called "rhetorikê" often implied the very opposite of what we call "rhetoric." To think clearly, to arrange your matter under formal heads, to have each paragraph definitely articulated and each sentence simply and exactly expressed: that was the main lesson of the Greek rhetor. The tendency was already beginning in classical times and no classical writer carried it further than Euripides. But here again Fate has been ironical with him. The ages that were incapable of understanding him loved him for his clearness: our own age, which might at last understand him, is instinctively repelled by it. We do not much like a poet to be very clear, and we hate him to be formal. We are clever readers, quick in the up-take, apt to feel flattered and stimulated by a little obscurity; mystical philosophy is all very well in a poet, but clear-cut intellect--no. At any rate we are sharply offended by "firstlys, secondlys and thirdlys," by divisions on the one hand and on the other hand. And all this and more Euripides insists on giving us. It is the great obstacle between him and us. Apart from it we have only to exercise a little historical imagination and we shall find in him a man, not indeed modern--half his charm is that he is so remote and austere--but a man who has in his mind the same problems as ourselves, the same doubts and largely the same ideals; who has felt the same desires and indignations as a great number of people at the present day, especially young people. Not because young people are cleverer than old, nor yet because they are less wise; but because the poet or philosopher or martyr who lives, half-articulate, inside most human beings is apt to be smothered or starved to death in the course of middle life. As long as he is still alive we have, most of us, the key to understanding Euripides.