with scorn on the claims of the demos to a larger share of power;
and there is hardly a play in which some political bias in that
direction may not be traced."

AEschylus wrote his plays in trilogies, or three successive dramas
connected. Of the eighty tragedies that he wrote, only seven
have been preserved. From three of these, The Persians, Prome'theus,
and Agamemnon, we have given extracts descriptive of historical
and mythological events. The latter is the first of three plays
on the fortunes of the house of A'treus, of Myce'nae; and these
three, of which the Choeph'oroe and Eumenides are the other two,
are the only extant specimen of a trilogy. The Agamemnon is the
longest, and by some considered the grandest, play left us by
AEschylus. "In the Agamemnon," says VON SCHLEGEL, "it was the
intention of AEschylus to exhibit to us a sudden fall from the
highest pinnacle of prosperity and renown into the abyss of ruin.
The prince, the hero, the general of the combined forces of the
Greeks, in the very moment of success and the glorious achievement
of the destruction of Troy, the fame of which is to be re-echoed
from the mouths of the greatest poets of all ages, in the very
act of crossing the threshold of his home, after which he had
so long sighed, and amidst the fearless security of preparations
for a festival, is butchered, according to the expression of
Homer, 'like an ox in the stall,' slain by his faithless wife,
his throne usurped by her worthless seducer, and his children
consigned to banishment or to hopeless servitude." [Footnote:
"Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature," by Augustus William
on Schlegel. Black's translation.]

Among the fine passages of this play, the death of Agamemnon, at