In attempting a general appreciation of this poet one should avoid making the error of judging him practically by the _Agamemnon_ alone. Otherwise we cannot hope to understand the feeling of fifth century Athens towards him. Most of his work has vanished, but the collection we possess seems fairly representative of his development; if we give weight to his comparatively inferior plays we may understand the feeling of two such different men as Aristophanes and Euripides. Incredible as it may seem, by the end of that century Æschylus was looked on as half-obsolete. Euripides thought of him much as Mr. Bernard Shaw now thinks of Shakespeare; Aristophanes, lover of the old order as he was, seems to have felt for the man who wrote the _Agamemnon_ a breezy half-patronizing affection; while putting him forward in the _Frogs_ to discomfit Euripides, he handles the older poet only less severely than he handles the younger. He and his contemporaries viewed Æschylus as a whole, not fixing their eyes exclusively on his final trilogy. Let us consider him first as a purely literary artist, a master of language, leaving his strictly dramatic qualities on one side. We find that his three great notes are grandeur, simplicity, and picturesqueness. To describe the grandeur of Æschylus is a hopeless task; some notion of it may be drawn from the account of his individual works just given, but the only true method is of course direct study of his writings. The lyrics, from the _Supplices_ to the _Eumenides_, touch the very height of solemn inspiration and moral dignity; as it has been often said, his only peers are the prophets of Israel. The non-lyrical portions of his work, stiff with gorgeous embroidery, are less like the conversations of men and women than the august communings of gods; that majestic poem which has for auditors the Sun himself, the rivers, the mountains, and the sea, and for background the whole race of man, is not merely written about Prometheus: it might have been written by Prometheus. But such magnificence has its perils. The mere bombast for which Kyd and even Marlowe are celebrated, and which has given us such things as The golden sun salutes the morn And, having gilt the ocean with his beams, Gallops the zodiac in his glistering coach,[265] was not unknown to Æschylus, as his wayward supporter Aristophanes with much relish demonstrates. It seems that such extravagances, “the beefy words, all frowns and crests, the frightful bogey-language,”[266] occurred entirely in the lost plays. But in those which survive we have much bombast of phrase, if not of words; the “thirsty dust, sister and neighbour of mud,”[267] Zeus, “chairman of the immortals,”[268] Typhos, who belcheth from fire-reeking mouth Black fume, the eddying sister of the flame,[269]