Altered thus, and comparatively flat :--

"With sacrifice before the rising morn

Vows have I made, by fruitless hope inspired;
And from the infernal Gods, mid shades forlorn
Of night, my slaughtered lord have I required:
Celestial pity I again implore;

Restore him to my sight-great Jove, restore!"

In the early edition the last stanza but one stood thus:

"Ah! judge her gently who so deeply loved!
Her who, in reason's spite, yet without crime,
Was in a trance of passion thus removed;
Delivered from the galling yoke of time,
And these frail elements, to gather flowers

Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers!"

In the later editions thus altered, and, to my taste, spoiled:

"By no weak pity might the Gods be moved;
She who thus perish'd not without the crime
Of lovers that in Reason's spite have loved,
Was doomed to wander in a grosser clime
Apart from happy ghosts, that gather flowers
Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers."

Altered, probably, because Virgil has introduced the shade of Laodamia among the criminal and unhappy lovers, an instance of extraordinary bad taste in the Roman poet; whatever may have been her faults, she surely deserved to be placed in better company than Phædra and Pasiphäe. Wordsworth's

intuitive feeling and taste were true in the first instance, and he might have trusted to them. In my own copy of Wordsworth I have been careful to mark the original reading in justice to the original Laodamia.

I HAVE never met with a statue, ancient or modern, of Hippolytus; the finest possible ideal of a Greek youth, touched with some individual characteristics which are peculiarly fitted for sculpture. He is a hunter, not a warrior; a tamer of horses, not a combatant with spear and shield. He should have the slight, agile build of a young Apollo, but nothing of the God's effeminacy; on the contrary, there should be an infusion of the severe beauty of his Amazonian mother, with that sedateness and modesty which should express the votary and companion of Diana;

while, as the fated victim of Venus, whom he had contemned, and of his stepmother Phædra, whom he had repulsed, there should be a kind of melancholy in his averted features. A hound and implements of the chase would be the proper accessories, and the figure should be undraped, or nearly so.

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A sculptor who should be tempted to undertake this fine, and, as I think, untried subject—at least as a single figure-must begin by putting Racine out of his mind, whose " Seigneur Hippolyte " makes sentimental love to the "Princesse Aricie," and must penetrate his fancy with the conception of Euripides.

I find in Schlegel's " Essais littéraires," a few lines which will assist the fancy of the artist, in representing the person and character of Hippolytus.

Rappelez vous ce que

"Quant à l'Hippolyte d'Euripide il a une teinte si divine que pour le sentir dignement il faut, pour ainsi dire, être initié dans les mystères de la beauté, avoir respiré l'air de la Grèce. l'antiquité nous a transmis de plus accompli parmi les images d'une jeunesse héroïque, les Dioscures de Monte-Cavallo, le Méléagre et l'Apollon du Vatican. Le caractère d'Hippolyte occupe dans la poësie à peu près la même place que ces statues dans la sculpture." "On peut remarquer dans plusieurs beautés idéales de l'antique que les anciens

voulant créer une image perfectionnée de la nature humaine ont fondu les nuances du caractère d'un sexe avec celui de l'autre ; que Junon, Pallas, Diane, ont une majesté, une sévérité mâle; qu' Apollon, Mercure, Bacchus, au contraire, ont quelque chose de la grace et de la douceur des femmes. De même nous voyons dans la beauté héroïque et vierge d'Hippolyte l'image de sa mère l'Amazone et le reflet de Diane dans un mortel."

(The last lines are especially remarkable, and are an artistic commentary on what I have ventured to touch upon ethically at page 85.)

The story of Hippolytus is to be found in basreliefs and gems; it occurs on a particularly fine sarcophagus now preserved in the cathedral at Agrigentum, of which there is a cast in the British Museum.

Under the heroic and classical form, Hippolytus conveys the same idea of manly chastity and selfcontrol which in sacred art would be suggested by the figure of Joseph the son of Jacob.

A noble companion to the Hippolytus would be Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles. He is the He is the young Greek warrior, strong and bold and brave; a fine

ideal type of generosity and truth. The conception, as I imagine it, should be taken from the Philoctetes of Sophocles, where Neoptolemus, indignant at the craft of Ulysses, discloses the trick of which he had been made the unwilling instrument, and restores the fatal, envenomed arrows to Philoctetes. The celebrated lines in the Iliad spoken by Achilles

"Who dares think one thing and another tell
My soul detests him as the gates of hell!"

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should give the leading characteristic motif in the figure of his son. There should be something of remorseful pity in the very youthful features; the form ought to be heroically treated, that is, undraped, and he should hold the arrows in his hand.

Neoptolemus, as the savage avenger of his father's death, slaying the grey-haired Priam at the foot of the altar, and carrying off Andromache, is, of course, quite a different version of the character. He then figures as Pyrrhus

"The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,

Black as his purpose, did the night resemble."

The fine moral story of Neoptolemus and Philoctetes is figured on the Etruscan vases. Of the young, truth-telling, Greek hero I find no single

statue.