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And Aristophanes testifies to his lasting popularity when he shows little Tomides with a bad grouch over seeing a play by Theognis, when he had gone to the theater "expecting Aeschylus"; and when he shows Aeschylus and Euripides winning, because his poetry had died with him, and so he had it there for a weapon whereas Aeschylus's was still alive and on earth.
It is the most harmless of all creatures, for it injures neither crops, fruit, nor cattle, and lives entirely upon dead corpses. It does not kill or injure anything that has life, and even abstains from dead birds from its relationship to them. Now eagles, and owls, and falcons, peck and kill other birds, in spite of Aeschylus's line, "Bird-eating bird polluted e'er must be."
And if you will measure Satan by Prometheus, the blind old Puritan's work by that of the fiery Grecian poet, does not Milton's angel surpass AEschylus's surpass him by "many a rood?" There IS the sublime, if you please a new sublime an original sublime quite as sublime as the Greek sublime.
But fortunately that position had to be quitted toute de suite; for the Indian theory is much nearer the English than the Greek; much liker Shakespeare's than Aeschylus's. Sakoontal is romantic; it came in a Third or Alawn Period; of all Englishmen, Keats might most easily have written it; if Endymion were a play, Endymion would be the likest thing to it in English.
On the Elizabethan stage, the murder of Agamemnon would no doubt have been "subjected to our faithful eyes" like the blinding of Gloucester or the suffocation of Edward II; but who shall say that there is less "specifically dramatic effect" in Aeschylus's method of mirroring the scene in the clairvoyant ecstasy of Cassandra?
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