Sophocles died in extreme old age, "without disease and without suffering, and was mourned with such a sincerity and depth of grief as were exhibited at the death of no other citizen of Athens." Thrice happy Sophocles! in good old age, Blessed as a man, and as a craftsman blessed, He died: his many tragedies were fair, And fair his end, nor knew be any sorrow. --PHRYN'ICHUS. Wind, gentle evergreen, to form a shade Around the tomb where Sophocles is laid; Sweet ivy wind thy boughs, and intertwine With blushing roses and the clustering vine. Thus will thy lasting leaves, with beauties hung, Prove grateful emblems of the lays he sung, Whose soul, exalted by the god of wit, Among the Muses and the Graces writ. --SIM'MIAS, the Theban. EURIP'IDES. Contemporary with Sophocles was Euripides, born in 480 B.C., the last of the three great masters of the drama--the three being embraced within the limits of a single century. Under Sophocles the principal changes effected in the outward form of the drama were the introduction of a third actor, and a consequent limitation of the functions of the chorus. Euripides, however, changed the mode of handling tragedy. Unlike Sophocles, who only limited the activity of the chorus, he disconnected it from the tragic interest of the drama by giving but little attention to the character of its songs. He also made some other changes; and, as one writer expresses it, his innovations "disintegrated the drama by destroying its artistic unity." But although perhaps inferior, in all artistic point of view, to his predecessors, the genius of Euripides supplied a want that they did not meet. Although his plays are all connected with the history and mythology of Greece, in them rhetoric is more prominent than in the plays of either Æschylus or Sophocles; the legendary characters assume more the garb of humanity; the tender sentiments--love, pity, compassion--are invoked to a greater degree, and an air of exquisite delicacy and refinement embellishes the whole. These were the qualities in the plays of Euripides that endeared him to the Greeks of succeeding ages, and that gave to his works such an influence on the Roman and modern drama.