unfair to the dramatist and his art to forget that he and his audience were all Athenians together.... When the Athenian dramatist, sharing the Athenian pride in their country’s history or legend, makes a character express a common patriotic emotion or belief, we cannot properly call that flattery of the audience, or an artifice for effect, even though the words were sure to call out rapturous applause. The bit of truth in such a view is so partial as to be false. But, as Professor Murray says of the choral ode in the _Medea_, “They are not at all the conventional glories attributed by all patriots to their respective countries.”[10] Moreover, these passages usually rest upon no popular belief, for the simple reason that they frequently corresponded neither to history nor to traditional mythology, but dealt with incidents that had been newly invented by the poet’s fancy or had at least been invested by him with new details and setting. At the beginning of the European conflagration in August, 1914, London managers hastened to bring out such plays as _Drake_, _Henry V_, and _An Englishman’s Home_. Was this merely the prompting of genuinely patriotic fervor on their part, or a misdirected attempt to exploit the emotions of their countrymen? The fact that this class of plays was soon withdrawn after it became apparent that the public heard enough about the war elsewhere without being reminded of it also in the theaters favors the latter explanation. Now, that Aristophanes frankly angled for the suffrages of his audiences cannot be denied. When, then, we remember how Euripides began to write for the stage when he was only eighteen, how he had to wait for a chorus in the great contest until he was thirty and then gained only the last place, how his first victory was deferred until 441 B.C. when he was forty-four years of age, how few were the victories that he won, how he courted his public by seeking out unhackneyed themes, by inventing sensational episodes, by reverting to the mannerisms of Aeschylus, by introducing sex problems—when we remember all this, can it be doubted that his chauvinistic passages were part and parcel of the same policy and were deliberately written with the same motives as are revealed in the choice of plays by Sir Herbert Tree and the other London managers of today? But perhaps it may be said that the psychology of managers is utterly unlike that of poets. In reply it would be possible and sufficient to cite the not infrequent concessions which Shakespeare and many another have made to the groundlings in their audiences, but I prefer to quote the words of a dramatist who has declared himself on the subject more explicitly. Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has recently written: