nurse in "Romeo and Juliet," although far more mischievous. She describes the strange malady of her mistress, and her own weary watching by the sufferer's couch. Phædra breaks out into frenzied song:

"Lift up my body,

Straighten my head,

Hold up the hands

And arms of the dead;

The joints of my limbs are loosened,
The veil on my brow is like lead.

Take it off, take it off, let the clustering curls
shoulders be spread."

On my

She pants for cooling streams and the whispering sound of shadowing poplars, and longs to stretch her limbs in repose on the verdurous meadow. Next comes an access of fever, and she breaks forth into wilder strains :

"Send nie, send me to the mountain: I will wander to the wood,

Where the dogs amid the pine-copse track and tear the wild beast's brood;

I will hang upon his traces where the dappled roebuck bounds:

I yearn, by all the gods, I yearn to halloo to the hounds,
To poise the lance of Thessaly above my yellow hair,
And to loose my hand and lightly launch the barbèd point
through air."

After more wild song and as wild speeches to the nurse, her secret is at length drawn from her; and that faithful but unscrupulous attendant reveals it,

under an oath of secrecy, to Hippolytus. Diana's worshipper, shocked at the disclosure, discourses on the profligacy of women in general, and determines to absent himself for a while until Theseus returns to Troezen, with the intention, as Phædra and her nurse believe, of disclosing to his father his wife's infidelity. Overwhelmed by shame and despair, Phædra hangs herself, but suspends from her neck a letter in which she accuses Hippolytus of making dishonourable proposals to her. Theseus, on his return from an oracle he had been consulting, finds his wife a lifeless corpse, and believes in his son's guilt. Him he curses as a base hypocrite, who, affecting to worship the chaste goddess, has attempted to commit a crime that even Venus would scarcely sanction. His supposed father Neptune, in an evil moment, had once given Theseus three fatal curses, one of which he now hurls at his innocent son. Hippolytus now turns his back for ever on his father's house: weeping, and attended by his weeping friends, he drives slowly and sadly along the sea-beach. The curse comes upon him in the form of a monster sent by Neptune. A messenger brings the tidings to Theseus. "There came," he says, "when we had passed the frontier of this realm of Troezen,—

"A sound, as if some bolt from Zeus Made thunder from the bowels of the earthA heavy hollow boom, hideous to hear.

A sudden fear fell on our youthful hearts

Whence came this awful voice: till with fixed gaze
Watching the sea-beat ridges, we beheld

A mighty billow lifted to the skies;
And with the billow, at the third great sweep
Of mountain surge, the sea gave up a bull,
Monster of aspect fierce, whose bellowings
Filled all the earth, that echoed back the roar

In tones that made us shudder."

The terrified horses become unmanageable; and though

"Our lord, in all their ways long conversant,

Grasped at their reins, and, throwing back his weight,
Pulled hard, as pulls a sailor at the oar;

They, with set jaws gripping the tempered bits,
Whirl along heedless of the master's hand,"-

until Hippolytus is dragged and dashed against the rocks, and lies a broken and bleeding body from which the spirit is rapidly fleeting. He is borne into his father's presence, torn, mangled, and bleeding, to die. But Theseus, still crediting Phædra's false letter, rejoices in his son's fate, although he alone believes him guilty. The messenger, indeed, bluntly tells the king that he is deceived:

"Yet to one thing I never will give credence,
That this thy son has done a deed of baseness,-
Not should the whole of womankind go hang,
And score the pines of Ida with their letters,
Because I know-I know that he is noble."

Diana, it may seem to the reader, is far from being a help to her devoted friend and worshipper in his time of trouble. The cause she assigns for her inability to save him gives a curious insight into the

comity of the ancient gods. She tells Theseus that his sin is rank, yet not quite unpardonable :

"For Cypris willed that these things should be so
To glut her rage; and this with gods is law,
That none against another's will resists
Or offers hindrance, but we stand aloof.
Else be assured, had not the fear of Zeus
Deterred me, I had not so sunk in shame
As to let die the dearest unto me

Of mortal men."

She then shows to Theseus how widely he has erred. Next follows a most affecting scene of reconciliation between the distracted father and his dying son. Diana soothes the last moments of Hippolytus by a promise that he shall be worshipped with highest honours at Troezen :

"For girls unwed, before their marriage-day,

Shall offer their shorn tresses at thy shrine,

And dower thee through long ages with rich tears;
And many a maid shall raise the tuneful hymn
In praise of thee, and ne'er shall Phædra's love
Perish in silence and be left unsung."

The "Hippolytus" was produced in B.C. 428. In the previous year Pericles died of the plague, which for some months longer continued to rage in Athens. To the pestilence and the death of the greatest of Attic statesmen there are palpable allusions in this tragedy, which to contemporary spectators cannot fail to have been deeply affecting. The nurse of Phædra bewails her lot as an attendant on a suffering mistress :

"Alas for mortal woes!

Alas for fell disease!

Better be sick than be the sick one's nurse;
Sickness is sickness, nothing worse;

Nursing is sorrow in double kind,

Sorrow of toiling hands, sorrow of troubled mind.
Our troubles know no healing."

And the final stave of the choral song unmistakably refers to Pericles :

"Upon all in the city alike

This sudden sorrow will strike.

There will be much shedding of tears.
When evil assails the great

Many bewail his fate;

Grief for him grows with the years."