and
composed pieces which for boldness and terrible sublimity have never
been surpassed. His fiery imagination, when once on the wing, soared
beyond the reach of earth, and seemed to spurn probability, and to
delight in gigantic images and tremendous prodigies. No poet ever had
such talents for inspiring terror. When his tragedy of EUMENIDES was
represented, many children died through fear, and several pregnant women
actually miscarried in the house, and it is related of him that nothing
could surpass the terrible ferocity of his countenance while, under the
inspiration of his sublime Muse, he composed his tragedies.

The mind of this very extraordinary man was comprehensive, energetic,
vigorous, and fiery: of him may with equal truth be said what doctor
Johnson has said of our Shakspeare:

Existence saw him spurn her wide domain.

For his imagination, daring, wild, and disorderly, resorted to the
agency of preternatural beings, and in one of his plays called up the
dead, with a degree of skill which Shakspeare only has surpassed, and
none but Shakspeare could at all equal. He selected his subjects from
the highest regions of sublimity, and his morals, always excellent, are
enforced by the most dreadful examples of divine vengeance. To sum up
his character in a few words--Longinus, the prince of Critias, says of
him that he had a noble boldness of expression, with an imagination
lofty and heroic, and his claim to the sublime has never been contested.
At the same time it must be owned that his style is, at least to modern
readers, obscure, and that his works are considered the most difficult
of all the Greek classics. The improvements he made in the drama seemed
to his cotemporaries to bespeak an intelligence more than human;
wherefore, to account for his wonderous works, they had recourse to
fable, and related that the god Bacchus revealed himself to him
personally, as he lay asleep under the shade of a vine, commanded him to
write tragedy, and inspired him with the means. This story is very
gravely told by the historian Pausanias.

There is little doubt that AEschylus felt a gratification in putting down
the monstrous rhapsodies to Bacchus and the other deities, with which
the idolatrous priests of that day blindfolded and deceived the people;
his plays having frequent cuts upon the gross superstition which then
darkened the heathen world. For some expressions which were deemed
impious he was condemned to die. I