who devoted their lives to her independence,—of the architects, sculptors, painters, poets, historians, and philosophers, whose names are, even at this day, shedding a glory over her ruins, brighter than that which illumines the maturity and vigour of any other state. This age may be denominated the spring of the world, and its productions, even in their decay, retain much of the freshness, and the bloom, and the beauty, of that delightful season. Their statues do not appear so much to be imitations of nature, as nature herself, starting into life, and assuming her finest forms. The ruins of their temples give us models of the grandest design and the most beautiful execution. Socrates taught a system of the purest morals and the most sublime theology, of which he exemplified the one in his life, and sanctioned the other by his death. In history, Thucydides and Xenophon have not yet been surpassed; and the dramatic writers gave to the drama a form which their successors may have modified and improved,—never changed. War was not then waged to aggrandize one and to degrade the many—it was the generous struggle of a whole people, determined to perish amid the ruins of their country, rather than receive a foreign yoke. In the battles of liberty, in which Æschylus, and Pindar, and Socrates, fought, a little band of freemen resisted and baffled the whole power of a mighty empire; and war, that in common cases depresses talent, and extinguishes all the arts but such as are subservient to the purposes of destruction, kindled a flame of enthusiasm that cherished and developed the seeds of whatever was great and good in man; and were we asked to name a period in which he is seen in the noblest view, our minds would turn to the years that elapsed from the Persian invasion, to the extinction of the liberties of Greece by Philip. The duration of freedom, and the glory of Greece, was short; but let it be remembered, that national glory was the offspring of national independence, and that they perished together. The lovers of mankind may lament, and the abettors of despotism may rejoice, that their existence was of so short a date; but a few such years are worth myriads of ages of monkish slumber, and one such victory as Salamis or Bannockburn is of more value than the innumerable triumphs of the vulgar herd of conquerors.
Hence the curiosity which every thing connected with that extraordinary people has excited, and the enthusiasm with which the ruins of their city have been explored, and the works of their poets and sages studied; yet it has happened, unfortunately for literature and the arts, that little more than the wrecks of their genius have survived. A pillar, or a capital, or a frieze, is all that remains of the temple that was the glory of the age that reared it; and of the ninety tragedies which the fertility of the genius of Æschylus produced, only seven have descended to us, and these in a mutilated and imperfect state; yet though in many passages it is obvious that the poetry has suffered from the carelessness of transcribers, and not less, perhaps, from the ambitious learning of the commentators, we can judge of these seven as wholes; and the more narrowly we examine them, the more cause shall we find to justify the admiration of his contemporaries, and of succeeding ages.
It is not the object of the writer of this essay to indulge in verbal criticism on the Greek text, or to attempt to restore imperfect readings by conjectural emendations, much less to aim at bringing forward original views of the Greek Tragedy. His design is simply to offer such obvious remarks as are most suitable to a miscellany of this kind, and to give such abstracts, and extract such passages, as may enable the reader to judge for himself of these celebrated productions. He is now to analyze two plays written on the same subject, the Chœphori of Æschylus, and the Electra of Sophocles.
While Agamemnon was at Troy, his queen, Clytemnestra, had an illicit intercourse with Ægysthus. Fearing the punishment due to their disloyalty, they surprised him on his return to Argos, murdered him, and usurped his throne. Electra, who at the time of her father's death was arrived at womanhood, secretly sent to Phocis, under the care of an aged and faithful tutor, her infant brother Orestes, well aware that her mother and Ægysthus would soon remove this only obstacle to the secure possession of that throne which they had obtained by adultery and murder. The punishment of the
