The ordinary style of Euripides is full, flexible, lucid, antithetic, studiously simple in vocabulary and charged with philosophic reflection. If we look in his extant remains for any trace of a style, like that of the _Rhesus_, which is comparatively terse, rich, romantic, not shrinking from rare words and strong colour and generally untinged by philosophy, we shall find the nearest approach to it in the _Cyclops_. Next to the _Cyclops_ I am not sure what play would come, but the _Alcestis_ would not be far off. It has especially several Epic forms which cannot be paralleled in tragedy. Now the conjunction of these two plays with the _Rhesus_ is significant. The three seem to be three earliest of the extant plays; they are also--if we count the _Heraclidae_ as mutilated--the three shortest. But, what is more important, the _Cyclops_ is not a tragedy but a satyr-play, and the _Alcestis_ is a tragedy of a special sort, written to take the place of a satyr-play. It is a tragedy with some half grotesque figures and a fantastic atmosphere. This is no place for a close analysis of the diction of the various works of Euripides; but taking one rough test, just for what it is worth, we may try to count the number of words in each play which are not found elsewhere in Euripides. The _Medea_, a central sort of play, has in its 1419 lines 103 such words. The _Alcestis_, with 1163 lines, has 122; the _Rhesus_, with less than 1000 lines, has 177; the _Cyclops_, with only 701 lines, has actually 220. This calculation is doubtless slightly inexact: in any case it is worth very little until it is carefully analysed. But on the whole it accords with my general impression that the _Rhesus_ in its variation from the Euripidean norm goes further than the _Alcestis_, and not so far as the _Cyclops_, and goes in very much the same direction. I feel in the _Rhesus_ a good deal of that curious atmosphere, not exactly comic, but wild and extravagant, which the Greeks felt to be suited to the Satyr horde; the atmosphere normally breathed by the one-eyed Giant of the cavern on volcanic Aetna, or the drunken and garlanded Heracles who wrestles with Death and cracks his ribs for him at midnight among the tombs. The whole scene and setting of the _Rhesus_; the man-wolf crawling away into the darkness and his two enemies presently crawling in out of the same darkness with his bloody spoils; the divine Thracian king with his round targe that shines by night and his horses whiter than the snow; the panic of the watch, the vaunting of the doomed chieftain, the goddess disguised as another goddess, the thrilling half-farcical scene where the spy Odysseus is actually caught and befools his captors: these things are not of course comic, like some incidents in the _Cyclops_. They belong to tragedy; but they are near the outside limit of the tragic convention, and would perhaps be most at home in a pro-satyric tragedy like the _Alcestis_.