before and awe the beholder. [Footnote: see Grote's "History
of Greece," Chap. lxvii.] Says a prominent reviewer: "The
conceptions of the imagination of AEschylus are remarkable for
a sort of colossal sublimity and power, resembling the poetry of
the Book of Job; and those poems of his which embody a connected
story may be said to resemble the stupendous avenues of the
Temple of Elora, [See Index.] with the vast scenes and vistas;
its strange, daring, though rude sculptures; its awful, shadowy,
impending horrors. Like the architecture, the poems, too, seem
hewn out of some massy region of mountain rock. AEschylus appears
as an austere poet-soul, brooding among the grand, awful, and
terrible myths which have floated from a primeval world, in which
traditions of the Deluge, of the early, rudimental struggle between
barbaric power and nascent civilization, were still vital."

"The personal temperament of the man," says DR. PLUMPTRE, [Footnote:
"The Tragedies of AEschylus," by E. H. Plumptre, D.D.] seems to
have been in harmony with the characteristics of his genius.
Vehement, passionate, irascible; writing his tragedies, as later
critics judged, as if half drunk; doing (as Sophocles said of
him) what was right in his art without knowing why; following
the impulses that led him to strange themes and dark problems,
rather than aiming at the perfection of a complete, all-sided
culture; frowning with shaggy brows, like a wild bull, glaring
fiercely, and bursting into a storm of wrath when annoyed by
critics or rival poets; a Marlowe rather than a Shakspeare: this
is the portrait sketched by one who must have painted a figure
still fresh in the minds of the Athenians. [Footnote: Aristophanes,
in The Frogs.] Such a man, both by birth and disposition, was
likely to attach himself to the aristocratic party, and to look