changes; it is not revolting to the spectator, since Orestes is so
absolutely unconscious of wrong in putting him to death. He shows his
blood-stained sword to Pylades with a real sorrow that his friend
should not also have enjoyed the rapture of killing the usurper. His
story of his escape on the night of Agamemnon's murder is as simple
and grand in movement as that of figures in an antique bas-relief.
Here and elsewhere one feels how Alfieri does not paint, but
sculptures his scenes and persons, cuts their outlines deep, and
strongly carves their attitudes and expression.

Electra is the worthy sister of Orestes, and the family likeness
between them is sharply traced. She has all his faith in the
sacredness of his purpose, while she has, woman-like, a far keener and
more specific hatred of Aegisthus. The ferocity of her exultation when
Clytemnestra and Aegisthus upbraid each other is terrible, but the
picture she draws for Orestes of their mother's life is touched with
an exquisite filial pity. She seems to me studied with marvelous
success.

The close of the tragedy is full of fire and life, yet never wanting
in a sort of lofty, austere grace, that lapses at last into a truly
statuesque despair. Orestes mad, with Electra and Pylades on either
side: it is the attitude and gesture of Greek sculpture, a group
forever fixed in the imperishable sorrow of stone.

In reading Alfieri, I am always struck with what I may call the
narrowness of his tragedies. They have height and depth, but not
breadth. The range of sentiment is as limited in any one of them as
the range of phrase in this Orestes, where the recurrence of the same
epithets, horrible, bloody, terrible, fatal, awful, is not apparently