aggrieved and punish the aggressor, then revenge, under the names of
war, invasion, conspiracy, the duel, and the like, ennobles itself,
and so works upon our minds as not only to be endured but to be
admirable and sublime."

In his Orestes he confesses that he sees much to praise and very
little to blame: "Orestes, to my thinking, is ardent in sublime
degree, and this daring character of his, together with the perils he
confronts, may greatly diminish in him the atrocity and coldness of a
meditated revenge.... Let those who do not believe in the force of a
passion for high and just revenge add to it, in the heart of Orestes,
private interest, the love of power, rage at beholding his natural
heritage occupied by a murderous usurper, and then they will have
a sufficient reason for all his fury. Let them consider, also, the
ferocious ideas in which he must have been nurtured by Strophius, king
of Phocis, the persecutions which he knows to have been everywhere
moved against him by the usurper,--his being, in fine, the son of
Agamemnon, and greatly priding himself thereon,--and all these things
will certainly account for the vindictive passion of Orestes....
Clytemnestra is very difficult to treat in this tragedy, since she
must be here,

"Now wife, now mother, never wife nor mother,

"which is much easier to say in a verse than to manage in the space
of five acts. Yet I believe that Clytemnestra, through the terrible
remorse she feels, the vile treatment which she receives from
Aegisthus, and the awful perplexity in which she lives ... will be
considered sufficiently punished by the spectator. Aegisthus is never
able to elevate his soul; ... he will always be an unpleasing, vile,