especially its fair and gentle mistress, are as justly popular as they are beloved and respected by the poorer classes around them, whose lot they are doing so much to lighten and improve. The feud with the hunting portion of the community has long since been laid to rest; and Arthur, now spending his first term at Rugby, is to enjoy an introduction to the delights of riding to hounds on his blood pony, under the auspices of the groom, when he comes home for the Christmas holidays. Mrs. Scallan is a frequent inmate of the household. Lord Chertsey, who is a very good son-in-law, insists on her paying a long visit every year to MountBurrard, where he always treats her with great respect, and nearly succeeds in making his wife do the same; but she is happier under her nephew's roof. The poor lady has aged fast; neither widow nor wife, with a husband dead to the world, but to whom her heart is still given, she is broken in health and spirits. She goes to Brighton every year for a change, and sometimes pays a visit to old friends from America, staying at the Langham Hotel; but she spends most of her time at the manor-house, and if allowed to do so, would spoil her grandnephew and grand-niece even more than she did her daughter.

For two little children now play at Clifford's knees, and each day he feels the greatness of his happiness

happiness lessened only by the sense that it is undeserved. That his crime has not been forgotten by the victim of it, he knows by the completeness with which he has been forgiven. No reproach has ever escaped Hilda's lips; he has not been called on to make any atonement for his misdeed in any punishment save that inflicted by his own conscience. That can never cease to reproach him, although with time the sense of it may grow blunter, as the days of his evildoing pass away into the distance, and are hidden from the mind's view by newer interests. Meanwhile, he feels that nothing can undo the injury he has inflicted on the woman he so dearly lovesloves more than ever as he measures the greatness of her forgiveness by his sense of the greatness of his sin against her. He feels that, do what he may to gain his wife's respect, she may have forgiven, but can never forget; and that, in place of the perfect confidence which there should have been between them, on one episode of their lives there must always be reserve and silence, tainted by the memory of a great wrong.

one

A SON's vengeance for his father's murder forms the theme of one of the greatest tragedies of Shakespeare. A like subject employed the pen of Eschylus, of Sophocles, and of Euripides, the three great tragedians of Greece; and as their three plays on the revenge of Orestes happen to be the only dramas extant by each of them on and the same story, it is obviously natural to compare them. Only, in doing so we are in danger of treating Euripides with some injustice. Schlegel has pronounced his "Electra" to be his worst play; and it is indisputably inferior to most of his tragedies. We are therefore contrasting him at his worst, with his two great rivals at their best an unfair treatment to which the critic, mindful of the grandeur of his Medea, and the tender beauty of his two Iphigenias, will be slow to subject him. Nor need we wonder if Euripides felt even his spirit quail on entering the lists with two such mighty athletes; if (to change the figure) on surveying the structures raised by two such architects, beholding the massive and rugged grandeur of the one temple, and the beautiful symmetry of the other, he were tempted to exclaim, "Better than you I cannot build, but like you I will not." His deviations from the treatment of the story by his predecessors can hardly have been thought improvements, even by himself; but they may well have seemed to him needful to enable his thrice-told tale to wear some gloss of novelty. And Milton, who loved Euripides so well, and who has echoed some of his strains, doubtless allowed for this exigency

of his position, when, recalling a famous chorus in this play, he styled its author "sad Electra's poet," as though in temporary oblivion of the far superior claims of his famous rivals.

When, having dismissed Euripides from the too unequal competition, we come to contrast those two great rivals of his with one another, it at first seems impossible to avoid giving the palm to Sophocles. In the conduct of the action, in the pathetic interest with which he invests its principal personages, and in the striking situations in which he places them, he appears at every point to improve on his great predecessor. One consideration must, however, be borne in mind, if we would give Eschylus his due place. The " Electra" of Sophocles is in itself a perfect whole. It does not depend on a foregoing, it does not prepare the way for a succeeding, drama. But the "Choëphori" of Eschylus is the second member of a great trilogy. It looks backward to the "Agamemnon," which precedes; above all, it looks onward to the "Eumenides," which follows it.

Less complete, then, in itself, from the nature of the case, than the

"Electra" of Sophocles, it may nevertheless be found perfect as a component part of a larger whole. More readily than the dramas of Sophocles and of Euripides, too, does it lend itself to a comparison with Hamlet; since with Eschylus, as with Shakespeare, the protagonist is the avenging son. With the other two Greek tragedians, it is the daughter of the murdered man whose sorrows make the strongest claim to our sympathies; and accordingly their

plays bear her name, which the drama of Eschylus does not.

And of a truth, no tragic heroine ever claimed the tears of an audience by a better title than the hapless Electra of Sophocles. Her girlhood saddened by the wrong done to her absent father by her guilty mother, she is doomed in early womanhood to see him murdered by his faithless wife on the very day of his triumphant return home; and then, horror of horrors! to see her wed and crown Ægisthus, the partner of her crimes. After this, she has to endure long years of cruel oppression at their hands, only cheered by the hope that she may yet live to see the blood of Agamemnon required from his slayers by her brother Orestes; for the boy, yet a child when his father fell, was saved by his brave sister, and sent forth under the charge of a trusty slave, to be sheltered in the house of Strophius, the Phocian. Eight or nine years elapse; the boy is grown to man's estate, and his sister sends letter after letter to implore him to return; standing forth herself the while as the one solitary champion of right against might in the polluted palace of Mycenae, never by word or deed desisting from her steadfast protest against the long-lasting injustice of which she is the victim-never ceasing to hope against hope that the gods will make justice prevail at last, and will see to the punishment of the prosperous wicked. Others may bow their heads to the blast; Electra holds hers erect, and braves the beating of the pitiless storm. Others may make terms with the usurpers, may dissimulate their disapproval; but neither for fear or favour will Electra consent to hide for a single instant her strong and enduring abhorrence of their wickedness, or to dry the tears for which

her buried but unavenged father calls. It is this profoundly pathetic situation which Sophocles presents to us in perfect pictures of unrivalled beauty. Euripides attenuates its force by novel additions to the story. And Eschylus is too much occupied with the terrible position in which, according to his view of the subject, Orestes is placed, to set his sister's sorrows before us with the fulness of detail in which Sophocles paints them; for the conception of Sophocles is simpler than that of Eschylus and of Euripides. Reverting to the account of Agamemnon's death given to us in the Odyssey,' he makes Ægisthus the slayer of Agamemnon, and Clytemnestra his guilty accomplice; so that his blood is to be required in the first instance from the former,-death being also meted to the latter for her share in the deed. Orestes, the murdered king's son, has one simple duty set before him-to avenge his father; and, by doing so, to cleanse his ancestral hearth from the pollution which his blood has brought upon it. This it is which Apollo the Purifier has enjoined upon him; and, this once done, he may look forward to a long and happy reign in the palace of his fathers. There is no place in this story, so considered, for anxious self-questionings, for painful complications arising out of conflicting duties. Led in by a god, the young avenger stands god-like, without fear or wavering, before us from the first; and his course is triumphant and happy like that of the sun rejoicing in his strength. It is far otherwise with the Orestes of Eschylus, and, in his degree, with that of Euripides; for whereas Clytemnestra was held by Sophocles to have wholly forfeited her maternal claims by killing her children's father, those claims,

the weird vision, so artfully conjured up by the bereaved mother, of the ghost of Iphigenia, standing motionless and mournful by the stream of Acheron to receive the cruel father who sent her thither in the first bloom of her youth and beauty; and to welcome him with a spectral kiss to her gloomy abode. For when the old men asked of Clytemnestra in their despair, "Ah! who shall bury him? who shall mourn for him?" she chilled their very heart's blood by her reply—

"By our hand he fell and died:

Our hand shall his grave provide,
Though no mourning throng attend
To convoy him to his end.

Fret thee not with care like this:
Him lovingly his child shall meet
By the swift stream of sighs, and greet
With fond embrace and tender kiss."
-Ibid.

In a word, the Agamemnon of
of
Eschylus is less of a guiltless vic-
tim, Clytemnestra less of an ordin-
ary murderess, than the two char-
acters as conceived by Sophocles.
And accordingly the vengeance of
the former's death by the execution
of the latter assumes in the hands
of Sophocles a more entirely judicial
type than Eschylus gave to it. The
vague mysterious background of
destiny against which his person-
ages loomed forth dark and majes-
tic to the eye of Eschylus disap-
pears, and they
stand out clear
and beautiful in the light of day,
but with some loss of their for-
mer majesty and tragic awe. For
this, however, Sophocles has pro-
vided very considerable compensa-
tion, as has been already said, in
the creation of a type of high femi-
nine resolution and steadfastness in
duty, only second to his own An-
tigone, in his Electra.

His beautiful play opens in front of that palace at Mycena which has long been her prison and house of sighs, that palace which can yet, after three thousand years, attract the explorer by its buried treasures and its fearful tales of woe and crime. But the clear morning light now gives the spectator good hope that the curse which has brooded over it so long is about to be removed" that the black night has waned, and the powers of light are in the ascendant," *

"Dark night

Is vanished with her stars, and the full choir Of wakening birds proclaim the daylight here," +

Orestes,

says the faithful old attendant of the youthful Orestes, whom, with his friend Pylades, son of Strophius, he is guiding back to his ancestral halls; and for a while the stage is occupied by the three, two of whom the aged full of memories, the young man full of hopes-stand devising how to execute the great enterprise which has brought them to the palace of Pelops. who is presented to the spectators in all the strength and beauty of earliest manhood, makes no question of the righteousness of his undertaking. No threatening god has driven him into it against his will. He has consulted Apollo about it indeed; but this not to learn whether it was lawful, but only how to accomplish it. The oracle has replied that not with an army but single-handed, not by open force but by skilful stratagem, would Orestes succeed in taking the two justly forfeited lives. So the two young friends have planned a scheme for the purpose. The old man, to