Euripides, like his predecessors, was a proficient in a great variety of arts, but neither sublime in conception, nor severe in style, as Æschylus and Sophocles had been. But his spirit teemed with splendid and amiable qualities, whose captivating power was highly relished by the age it came to decorate and complete. The energetic dignity of the first great master, and the chaste sweetness of his still greater rival, had passed; now appeared one who was indeed worthy of much admiration, but the least divine of the noble triad, whose natural course declined from the elevated cothurnus toward level ground. When Euripides clothed Pentheus in female dress, and exhibited Hercules as a glutton, he showed himself to be the precursor of comedy, that first symptom of literary decline, and thus won the praise of Menander, as he deserved the lash of Aristophanes. The latter, who was his cotemporary, unceasingly castigated his effeminate prettiness, but never attacked the manly elegance of Sophocles, or the gigantic vigor of Æschylus. Agathon, with others of some note, continued for a season to write for the stage; but in Euripides the forcible and refined tragedy of Greece came to an end. As the nine Muses wept at the funeral of Achilles, so grieved the nations at that mighty fall. There was the wisdom of a deep moral in that Athenian law, which interdicted a judge of the Areopagus from writing a comedy. Until a grosser age supervened, the Greeks were not inclined to scrutinize the ludicrous side of things. The goddess of the Iliad, who warded off the dart from her favorite, was an apt symbol of the Genius of Civilization, throned on the Acropolis, where Beauty, mother of Excellence, threw down her mantle and intercepted the arrows of every foe. Greek farce was often insolent, but never utterly vicious. While Aristophanes portrayed the foibles of town-life with a caustic hand, he ceased not to keep in view a healthful suburb of gardens in redeeming bloom. As Minerva, with precious elixir, concealed the wrinkles of Ulysses, the age of Pericles performed well its mission of investing every thing venerable and instructive with the most elaborate charms. All the gentler shapes of fancy that, in the preparatory time, bloomed in the lyrics of Greece, were only flowers unfolding round the aspiring trunk of tragedy, attracted by its superior strength, and sheltered by the majesty of its shade. Æschylus, however triumphant in the field of martial prowess one day, was the next not less ambitious of poetic garlands at the Olympic games. And Thebes was not more gloriously embalmed in the melody of Pindar, than was Colonos through the art of Sophocles, as her melodious thrush in his verse enjoys a perpetual May.