The cardinal line of the poem, "Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum," is elicited from him as his protest against the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father.
Amongst the finest of his classical pictures were - "Syracusan Bride leading Wild Beasts in Procession to the Temple of Diana" (1866), "Venus disrobing for the Bath" (1867), "Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon," and "Helios and Rhodos" (1869), "Hercules wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis" (1871), "Clytemnestra" (1874), "The Daphnephoria" (1876), "Nausicaa" (1878), "An Idyll" (1881), two lovers under a spreading oak listening to the piping of a shepherd and gazing on the rich plain below; "Phryne" (1882), a nude figure standing in the sun; "Cymon and Iphigenia" (1884), "Captive Andromache" (1888), now in the Manchester Art Gallery; with the "Last Watch of Hero" (1887), "The Bath of Psyche" (1890), now in the Chantrey Bequest collection; "The Garden of the Hesperides" (1892), "Perseus and Andromeda" and "The Return of Persephone," now in the Leeds Gallery (1891); and "Clytie," his last work (1896).
Its fame was due to the tradition that it was the starting-place of the Greek fleet before the Trojan War, the scene of the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
In 1676 he published his attack on James Butler, marquess of Ormonde, entitled "The Unkinde Desertor of Loyall Men and True Frinds," and shortly afterwards "The Bleeding Iphigenia."
Three old cruisers," Iphigenia," Thetis "and" Intre p id "(all built about 1891), filled with cement, were to enter the harbour and be sunk at the entrance to the ship canal to Bruges.