[C] "Gulliver's Travels."
[D] Plut. in "Vit. Cim."
[E] "The men respect you, and the women love you."—Such was the subtle compliment paid by Prior to one equally ambitious of either distinction; viz. Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke.
[F] Epicurean.
[G] The celebrated comparison between Sculpture and the Ancient Painting and the Modern Dramatic Poetry, is not applicable to Euripides, who has a warmth and colour of passion which few, indeed, of the moderns have surpassed, and from which most of the modern writers have mediately, if not directly, borrowed their most animated conceptions.
[H] Among the taunting accusations which Aristophanes, in his Comedy of the Frogs, lavishes upon Euripides, through the medium of Æschylus, is that of having introduced female love upon the stage! Æschylus, indeed, is made, very inconsistently, considering his Clytemnestra (Ran. 1. 1042) to declare that he does not know that he ever represented a single woman in love. At a previous period of the comedy, Euripides is also ridiculed, through a boast ironically assigned to his own lips, for having debased Tragedy by the introduction of domestic interest—(household things, οικεΐα πράγματα). Upon these and similar charges have later critics, partly in England, especially in Germany, sought by duller diatribes to perpetuate a spirit of depreciation against the only ancient tragic poet who has vitally influenced the later stage. The true merit of Euripides is seen in the very ridicule of Aristophanes.
[I] "Wise Sophocles, wiser Euripides, wisest of all, Socrates," was the well-known decision of the Delphian Oracle. Yet the wisdom of Euripides was not in the philosophical sentences with which he often mars the true philosophy of the drama. His wisdom is his pathos.
[J] Gibbon, after a powerful sketch of the fraud, the corruption, and the vices of George the Cappadocian, thus concludes:—"The odious stranger, disguising every circumstance of time and place, assumed the mask of a martyr, a saint, and a Christian hero; and the infamous George of Cappadocia has been transformed into the renowned St. George of England, the patron of arms, of chivalry, and the garter."—Gibbon's Decline and Fall, vol. iv. c. xxiii.
"Italian Beauty! didst thou not inspire
Raphael, who died in thy embrace?"—Byron.