What a plenitude of brilliant and powerful description! Every verse, every half verse, adds a characterizing circumstance, a vivifying image. And what an integrity and self-completeness has the daring and large conception of either martial king! And how distinguishably the two stand apart from each other! But above all, what a sudden and rich addition to our stock of heroic poetical portraitures! Here is no imitation. Neither Lycurge nor Emetrius is any where in poetry but here. Not in the _Iliad_-not in the _AEneid_. You cannot compose either of them from the heroes of antiquity. Each is original--new--self-subsisting. The monarch of Thrace is invested with more of uncouth and savage terror. He is bigger, broader. Might for destroying is in his bulk of bone and muscle. Bulls draw him, and he looks taurine. A bear-skin mantles him; and you would think him of ursine consanguinity. The huge lump of gold upon his raven-black head, and the monster hounds, bigger than the dog-kind can be imagined to produce, that gambol about his chariot, all betoken the grosser character of power--the power that is in size--material. The impression of the portentous is made without going avowedly out of the real. His looking is resembled to that of a griffin, because in that monster imagined at or beyond the verge of nature, the ferocity of a devouring, destroying creature can be conceived as more wild, and grim, and fearful than in nature's known offspring, in all of whom some kindlier sparkles from the heart of the great mother, some beneficently-implanted instincts are thought of as tempering and qualifying the pure animal fierceness and rage.