Few, indeed, of the large audience which heard Professor de Sumichrast lecture on the Phedre of Racine yesterday afternoon, have ever had the opportunity to listen to a more warmly sympathetic or deeply appreciative review of this masterpiece of the great Racine.

Phedre is an immortal play, one of those works of the human brain which will live and be admired so long as man has the power to appreciate the highest beauty and loftiest art. The power of the last two plays which have been discussed, was, as we have seen, in the appreciation of character and in the reality and truth with which events long since passed and scenes laid in far distant countries were brought before our minds by the mighty pen of the author; in Phedre we meet with events of the times of the ancient Greeks, clothed for most of us as in the mists and glamour of mythology, but here brought into the vivid light of our own times and appealing to us with the force of life itself.

The inspiration of Phedre, as with the Greek and Latin plays of old, came from the church. The play of Euripides, as we feel the giant force of the ringing sentences, while it holds us entranced, yet makes us shudder with horror at the uncouth roughness of the plot. The characters are in the main the same, the only marked difference being in the relative importance given to Phedre and Hyppolites; in the Greek, the play centres about the man, our only feeling towards Phedre being of the utmost contempt, such only as we might feel for the lowest of human beings; in the Latin play of Seneca the same is true, but when we come to the French this woman who has hitherto been of but secondary importance, suddenly steps to the front, she commands our attention, holding us transfixed while present and claiming our thoughts while absent. She is no longer the degraded wife, worthy only of loathing, she struggles against her fate, is vanquished, but not without making the most heroic efforts to overcome the poison of her passion. Before we finish the play she has not only succeeded in interesting us, but she has won our pity and sympathy; nothing could be a greater tribute to the genius of Racine than this acknowledgment which every reader of the play must make.

The inevitable workings of fate were never better illustrated; Phedre's fate is settled from the beginning of the play it is little short of madness for her to hope to successfully combat the will of the Gods.

Professor. de Sumichrast concluded his lecture by a careful summary of the play analyzing the complicating passions of the human heart as shown throughout, and completely refuting the objection of some of the critics that the play was monotonous and lacked dramatic interest.