is lurking underneath. Then, not in a desultory spirit, but with the strictest design, he carries off the mind to the deed which is to be the germ of all the coming calamities, the great crime of Iphigenia's murder, which both exemplifies the searing deceitful influence of ambition even on a noble heart, and exhibits Agamemnon himself as the criminal upon whom judgment is about to fall. He paints him with exquisite delicacy; not as abandoned and depraved, for this would prevent the application of the example to the personal conduct of his audience (since no one believes himself to be hardened and depraved, and therefore no one would allow the parallel between himself and such a character, nor draw the inference required); but with just such a mixture of vice and virtue, of external temptation and internal weakness, of previous struggle against crime and subsequent abandonment to it, as constitutes the unhappy monarch a fit representative of human nature, a mirror in which any individual might venture to contemplate his own character and his own fate.

As if to relieve the direct practical and moral appeal of the play, and to interweave with it the third great object of art, to please and soothe, Eschylus then introduces the beautiful description of the fire-beacons by which the news of the capture of Troy is supposed to have been transmitted to Argos. There may be in this something more than at first presents itself. It may be connected with some scheme of defence which we know was then introduced, and bore upon the facilities and difficulties of foreign invasion. But without dwelling on such a hypothesis, there is in the whole range of nature

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nothing so full of the picturesque as the effects of fire and darkness combined; and nothing in external nature harmonizes so well with all that is grand and fearful in the moral world; and instead, therefore, of being appended to the play, as a mere purple patch," this description is to be regarded as appropriate scenery, as the background of the picture, as contributing to the general tone and colouring; on the same principle on which painters introduce storms, and clouds, and lightning, into historical subjects with which they have no direct connexion. There have been critics who professed to doubt whether Grecian art understood the picturesque as well as the beautiful, - meaning by picturesque, all that pleases by contrast, by seeming irregularity, by broken harmonies, and outlines of thought and ideas suggested rather than expressed; and meaning by beauty, strict definite forms and proportions, where all that is meant is traced legibly to the eye. This might be true of later Grecian art; but no Vernet ever imagined a night-scene more picturesque than this description of Eschylus. Every word tells. The fire becomes a courier, leaping from height to height. Instead of a vague generalization, all the mountains are singled out and painted. The scaur (éraç) of Lemnos, with its sides scarred and seamed by torrents; the great upheaved cone or hump (airòs) of Athos; the scaur again of Citharon; the watchheight of Macistus; the beetling headland looking down on the Saronic Gulf; the flame passing from pinnacle to pinnacle, now ridging the sea with fire, now like "the golden sun," and now like "the pale clear moon;" at one time lifting itself like a gigantic torch, at another

tossing and shaking its "mighty beard of fire;" now stooping over the Gorgopian lake, and now blazing up from the pile of "grey old heath :" all these are exquisite poetical touches, worthy of the first of sensuistic artists; that is, of artists who think only of addressing their compositions to the senses.

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In the mouth of Clytemnestra this description answers another purpose. Put side by side with the elaborate artificial description, which follows, of the capture of Troy, it intimates the veil of restraint thrown over her intentions: it betrays the real coldness, at least, of her affections: and it exhibits her as a queen grandiloquent and noble," in order to balance the degradation of her character as an adultress; and so to preserve, as in the case of Agamemnon, some mixture and proportion of good and evil, lest either the good should extinguish the blame, or the evil should obliterate the pity, and in either case the moral lesson should fail of its personal application.

Nor must the art be overlooked with which Eschylus mysteriously insinuates and develops by degrees the calamity which is at hand. From the first hint of the watchman, in the word avopóßovλor, to the last fatal crime and act, he is engaged in withdrawing, fold by fold, the veil which hangs before it; arresting the attention, alarming the mind, and suggesting anticipations with a wonderful skill, sometimes by mere words, sometimes by obvious ambiguities, sometimes by vague expressions of alarm; the storm of terror (to use his own metaphor) beginning like a thunder shower, drop by drop, until it bursts and pours down in the torrent of

Cassandra's prophecy. Sophocles, in the Edipus Tyrannus, has been praised for the same gradual and exciting development of his catastrophe by means of a combination of facts: but the same effect is produced more skilfully and with more of the sublime in Eschylus, by employing not a mere accidental combination of outward events, but the deep, prophetic, supernatural intimations, whether of man's moral nature or of extraordinary inspiration, and by combining them with the forced silence of those who dare not warn against the coming ill, and the involuntary betrayals of a mind that is plotting crime.

As he took care in the first chorus to fix attention, and to draw out the character of Agamemnon, in the next he brings out another figure; not one merely to fill up the picture, or to rouse emotions of pity, still less to employ the time of the Chorus the true impersonation of himself as the great moral prophet standing before the stage, and, as with a wand, touching every fact as it occurs, and bringing its moral lesson to life before the eyes of the indolent spectator. The aggressions of Athens upon the East were a work of retribution. She had been deeply injured; and in this injury she was likely to forget that vengeance belonged to another. But so had Agamemnon been injured, and Menelaus; and no evasion from the personal application of the moral was to be permitted by a failure to establish an exact parallel in the crime. And in painting Menelaus, the same law is to be observed as in painting Agamemnon ; the good and the evil are to be blended. He is represented under suffering, which in the eye of man is virtue; as suffering patiently and nobly,

and yet committing no slight offence in involving his country in the fatal prosecution of his own revenge.

"Even so did Paris come

Unto the Atrida's dome," &c. &c.

Upon this exquisite chorus there follows the introduction of a herald from the army; who, according to the interpretation of a sensuistic criticism, answers no other purpose but to fill up the time, before Agamemnon's appearance, with a poetical description of the miseries endured during the siege, and of the storm which befel the army on its return. But, if the warning against foreign warfare be the political object of the play, and the key to its construction, the herald has to discharge a much more important duty. He could not have touched on two ideas more likely to give weight to the remonstrances of the poet; and in this light we are disposed to regard this otherwise perplexing portion of the drama, in which nothing is introduced to further the plot, except perhaps another development of the artificial "grandiloquence" of Clytemnestra, and the explanation of the absence of Menelaus, whose presence might have seemed likely to embarrass the catastrophe.

Then follows a third chorus; not a mere elegy, fastened on without object or connexion. with the main fabric, as a ballet between the acts of a tragedy, but constructed on the same principle with the dramatic speeches of Thucydides, in order to introduce, under a new form, personages and facts which were necessary to complete the work, but lay beyond its immediate limits. Agamemnon and Menelaus have been