It would therefore appear that the critics have had some cause of complaint against Euripides, on account of technical defects in the _Alcestis_. They have indeed been very severe, not only on this play, but on his drama generally, charging him with all sorts of artistic sins which need not trouble us in the least. Fortunately, we are not much concerned with criticism: and in this case there is opposed to the censure a vast body of praise, ranking most of the poets on its side, and all the minds which are attuned most nearly to the reflective note of Euripidean poetry. If, however, we had time for a comparison with Sophocles, we should quickly find for ourselves the one fact which gives colour to much of the critics’ grumbling. Euripides was not, like Sophocles, a consummate artist. But we should not stop at such profitless negation; for a larger truth would spring to light a moment afterward. While the art is less, the thought is much greater: there is a wider range, and a higher ideal. Euripides is not content to make perfect drama: he must give humanity the fullest and most complete expression possible to him. And since he saw into the human heart with an eye at once so keen and pitiful; since he felt with such insistence the ethical and intellectual problems of the transition period in which he lived, it is no wonder if the artist in him was sometimes taxed beyond his powers. The great Periclean Age was passing; and the new era had some curious intellectual resemblances to our own time. It had begun to examine the bases of its religion; it had seen a great development of the democratic spirit; and it was awakening to something wrong in the position of women. That these questions greatly exercised the mind of Euripides we may see from the prominent place they occupy in his drama; and that he must have been an original and advanced thinker upon them is evident from certain facts of his personal unpopularity, and from the freshness of his ideas to the modern mind. That modernity is indeed one cause of his intimate appeal to the thought of our own day; and so far as it touches the question of womanhood, it has a peculiar interest for us.