d endowments, and, as some say, the resentment of the
female part of Athens, subjected him to a degree of ridicule and
rancorous invective, which induced him to leave Athens; when he went
into Macedonia, and lived at the court of king Archelaus, who considered
it an honour to patronise such a great poet, bestowing upon him the most
conspicuous marks of his friendship and munificence, and even carrying
his esteem and admiration so far, as to make him his prime minister.
This dignified office Euripides held when he lost his life, in a manner
the most cruel and horrible that can be conceived.

In one of his solitary walks, in a wood to which he had been accustomed
to repair every evening, for the purpose of uninterrupted contemplation,
a pack of dogs belonging to the king set upon him and tore him to pieces
in the seventy-eighth year of his age. So extraordinary and deplorable a
death naturally gave rise to a multitude of conjectures, and, of course,
not very charitable ones. By some, the creatures of Archelaus's court
who hated him as a successful rival, and envied him the high favours
bestowed upon him by the king, were suspected of having purposely
procured the dogs to be let loose upon, in order to destroy him:
a conjecture not at all probable. By others again it has been suggested
that he was torn to pieces by women in revenge for his black pictures of
the sex: a still more improbable conjecture, and probably borrowed from
the fate of Orpheus; but which still serves to show how little kindness
he was thought to deserve from the women; while others more rationally
concluded that his encountering the dogs and their attacking him, was
purely an accidental circumstance; and that having in the abstraction
and absence of mind, attendant upon very profound meditation, encroached
upon some part of the palace grounds, which the dogs were appointed to
guard, he found his mistake too late to escape from their fury.

Sophocles outlived Euripides about a year, leaving behind him no one
capable of improving, or even of tolerably supporting the tragic stage
of Greece. The hopes of the Grecian drama was buried in the grave along
with him. Of those who succeeded him we know nothing; nor should we know
that any did succeed, if the history of Aristophanes did not inform us,
that there were such, who served only as butts for his malevolent wit.

Never were greater honours conferred by national gratitude and pride
than those which were p