Still, there are moments of genuine dramatic passion in all three of these plays: in “Herod,” for instance, where Mariamne acknowledges to the tetrarch that her love for him is dead. And in “Ulysses,” Telemachus’s recognition of his father moves one very deeply, producing its impression, too, by a few speeches in a perfectly simple, unembroidered diction, by means properly scenic, not poetic like Tennyson’s. “Ulysses” seems the best of Mr. Phillips’s pieces, more loosely built than the others, but of more varied interest and more lifelike. The gods speak in rhyme and the human characters in blank verse, while some of the more familiar dialogue is in prose; Ctesippus, an elderly wooer of Penelope, is a comic figure; and there is a good deal of rough, natural fooling among the wooers, shepherds, and maids in the great hall of Ithaca. In its use of popular elements and its romantic freedom of handling, the play contrasts with Robert Bridges’s “The Return of Ulysses,” which Mr. Yeats praises for its “classical gravity” and “lyric and meditative” quality. Mr. Phillips opens his scene on Calypso’s island, and brings his wandering hero home only after making him descend to the shades. His Ulysses shoots the wooers in full view of the audience. In Mr. Bridges’s play the action begins in Ithaca, the unities of time and place are observed, and so is dramatic decency. The wooers are slain outside, and their slaying is described to Penelope by a handmaid who sees it from the door. Yet, upon the whole, Mr. Phillips’s constructive formula is more Sophoclean than Shakespearean. Not that he adheres to the external conventions of Attic tragedy, the chorus, the unities, etc., like Matthew Arnold in “Merope”; but that his plot evolution exhibits the straight, slender line of Sophocles, rather than the rich composite pattern of Elizabethan tragi-comedy. I have been told by some who saw “Ulysses” played, that the descent _ad inferos_ was grotesque in effect. But “Paolo and Francesca” might have gained from an infusion of grotesque. D’Annunzio’s almost precisely contemporary version of the immortal tale has just the solid, materialistic treatment which makes you feel the brutal realities of mediaeval life, the gross soil in which this “lily of Tartarus” found root. Mr. Phillips’s latest piece, “The Sin of David,” a tragedy of Cromwell’s England, is now in its first season.