rdour of Antigone, and the no less heroic
persistence and endurance of Electra, are both founded on the strength
of their affection. And the affection in both cases is what some
moderns too have called the purest of human feelings, the love of a
sister for a brother. Another aspect of that world-old marvel, 'the
love of women,' was presented in Aias' captive bride, Tecmessa. This
softer type also attains to heroic grandeur in Deanira, the wronged
wife of Heracles, whose fatal error is caused by the innocent working
of her wounded love.

It is strange that so acute a critic as A.W. Schlegel should have
doubted the Sophoclean authorship of the Trachiniae. If its religious
and moral lessons are even less obtrusive than those of either Oedipus
and of the Antigone, there is no play which more directly pierces to
the very heart of humanity. And it is a superficial judgement which
complains that here at all events our sympathies are distracted
between the two chief persons, Deanira and Heracles. To one passion of
his, to one fond mistake of hers, the ruin of them both is due. Her
love has made their fates inseparable. And the spectator, in sharing
Hyllus' grief, is afflicted for them both at once. We may well
recognize in this treatment of the death of Heracles the hand of him
who wrote--

[Greek:
su kai dikaion adikous
phrenas paraspas epi loba,
..., ...
amachos gar empaizei theos Aphrodita[3].]

7. It is unnecessary to expatiate here on the merits of construction
in which these seven plays are generally acknowledged to be
unrivalled; the natural way in which the main situation is explained,
the suddenness and inevitableness of the complications, the steadily
sustained climax of emotion until the action culminates, the
preservation of the fitting mood until the end, the subtlety and
effectiveness of the minor contrasts of situation and character[4].

But it may not be irrelevant to observe that the 'acting qualities' of
Sophocles, as of Shakespeare, are best known to those who have seen
him acted, whether in Greek, as by the students at Harvard[5] and
Toronto[6], and more recently at Cambridge[7], or in English long ago
by Miss Helen Faucit (since Lady Martin[8]), or still earlier and
repeatedly in Germany, or in the French version of the Antigone by MM.
Maurice and Vacquerie (1845) or of King Oedipus by M. Lacroix, in
which the part of OEdipe Roi was finely sustained by M. Geoffroy in
1861, and by