The most obvious point of inferiority in Euripides is the choice of his subjects, which are charged with meanness and effeminacy; while Sophocles and Æschylus chose for theirs the most dignified and noble passions. He has moreover given very disgraceful pictures of the fair sex, making women the contrivers, the agents, and the instruments of the most impure and diabolical machinations. This unjust perversion was attributed to a hatred he had to women, which occasioned him to be called μισογυνης, or the woman-hater; but this he sturdily refuted by insisting that in those bad characters he had faithfully copied the nature of the sex. Notwithstanding this, he was married twice; but was so injudicious in his choice of wives, that he was compelled to divorce both. In his person Euripides was noble and majestic, and in his deportment grave and serious. No poet ever took more pains than Euripides in polishing and perfecting his tragedies. He composed very slow, and laboured his periods with the greatest care and difficulty; anticipating the valuable instructions long afterwards given by Horace to poets. A wretched author, whose heart was as malicious as his poetry was miserable, once sarcastically observed that _he_ had written a hundred verses in three days, while Euripides had written only three. “True,” replied Euripides, “but there is this difference between your poetry and mine; yours will expire in three days, but mine will live for ages.” The disputes between Sophocles and our poet, the jealousy and envy of his great fame and endowments, and, as some say, the resentment of the female part of Athens, subjected him to a degree of ridicule and rancorous invective, which induced him to leave Athens; when he went into Macedonia, and lived at the court of king Archelaus, who considered it an honour to patronise such a great poet, bestowing upon him the most conspicuous marks of his friendship and munificence, and even carrying his esteem and admiration so far, as to make him his prime minister. This dignified office Euripides held when he lost his life, in a manner the most cruel and horrible that can be conceived.