Of Euripides MR. SYMONDS remarks: "His lasting title to fame consists in his having dealt with the deeper problems of life in a spirit which became permanent among the Greeks, so that his poems never lost their value as expressions of current philosophy. Nothing strikes the student of later Greek literature more strongly than this prolongation of the Euripidean tone of thought and feeling. In the decline of tragic poetry the literary sceptre was transferred to comedy; and the comic playwrights may be described as the true successors of Euripides. The dialectic method, which he affected, was indeed dropped, and a more harmonious form of art than the Euripidean was created for comedy by Menan'der, when the Athenians, after passing through their disputatious period, had settled down into a tranquil acceptation of the facts of life. Yet this return to harmony of form and purity of perception did not abate the influence of Euripides. Here and there throughout his tragedies he had said, and well said, what the Greeks were bound to think and feel upon important matters; and his sensitive, susceptible temperament repeated itself over and over again among his literary successors. The exclamation of Phile'mon that, if he could believe in immortality, he would hang himself to see Euripides, is characteristic not only of Philemon, but also of the whole Macedonian period of Greek literature." [Footnote: "The Greek Poets." Second Series, p. 300.] Euripides wrote about seventy-five plays, of which eighteen have come down to us. The Me-de'a, which is thought to be his best piece, is occupied with the circumstances of the vengeance taken by Medea on the ungrateful Jason, the hero of the Argonautic expedition, for whom she had sacrificed all, and who, after his return, abandoned her for a royal Corinthian bride. [Footnote: See Argonautic Expedition, p. 81.] But the most touching of the plays of Euripides is the Alces'tis, founded on the fable of Alcestis dying for her husband, Adme'tus. MILTON thus alludes to the story, in his sonnet on his deceased wife: Methought I saw my late espoused saint Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave, Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave, Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint. The substance of the story is as follows: