those elder divinities who typify the gloomy powers of primaeval nature,
and who had been driven long ago into Tartarus before the presence of a
new and better order of things. He endeavours to swell out his language to
a gigantic sublimity, corresponding to the vast dimensions of his
personages. Hence he abounds in harsh compounds and over-strained
epithets, and the lyrical parts of his pieces are often, from their
involved construction, extremely obscure. In the singular strangeness of
his images and expressions he resembles Dante and Shakspeare. Yet in these
images there is no want of that terrific grace which almost all the
writers of antiquity commend in Aeschylus.

Aeschylus flourished in the very freshness and vigour of Grecian freedom,
and a proud sense of the glorious struggle by which it was won, seems to
have animated him and his poetry. He had been an eye-witness of the
greatest and most glorious event in the history of Greece, the overthrow
and annihilation of the Persian hosts under Darius and Xerxes, and had
fought with distinguished bravery in the memorable battles of Marathon and
Salamis. In the _Persians_ he has, in an indirect manner, sung the
triumph which he contributed to obtain, while he paints the downfall of
the Persian ascendancy, and the ignominious return of the despot, with
difficulty escaping with his life, to his royal residence. The battle of
Salamis he describes in the most vivid and glowing colours. Through the
whole of this piece, and the _Seven before Thebes_, there gushes forth a
warlike vein; the personal inclination of the poet for a soldier's
life, shines throughout with the most dazzling lustre. It was well
remarked by Gorgias, the sophist, that Mars, instead of Bacchus, had
inspired this last drama; for Bacchus, and not Apollo, was the tutelary
deity of tragic poets, which, on a first view of the matter, appears
somewhat singular, but then we must recollect that Bacchus was not merely
the god of wine and joy, but also the god of all higher kinds of