Electra is the worthy sister of Orestes, and the family likeness between them is sharply traced. She has all his faith in the sacredness of his purpose, while she has, woman-like, a far keener and more specific hatred of Aegisthus. The ferocity of her exultation when Clytemnestra and Aegisthus upbraid each other is terrible, but the picture she draws for Orestes of their mother's life is touched with an exquisite filial pity. She seems to me studied with marvelous success. The close of the tragedy is full of fire and life, yet never wanting in a sort of lofty, austere grace, that lapses at last into a truly statuesque despair. Orestes mad, with Electra and Pylades on either side: it is the attitude and gesture of Greek sculpture, a group forever fixed in the imperishable sorrow of stone. In reading Alfieri, I am always struck with what I may call the narrowness of his tragedies. They have height and depth, but not breadth. The range of sentiment is as limited in any one of them as the range of phrase in this Orestes, where the recurrence of the same epithets, horrible, bloody, terrible, fatal, awful, is not apparently felt by the poet as monotonous. Four or five persons, each representing a purpose or a passion, occupy the scene, and obviously contribute by every word and deed to the advancement of the tragic action; and this narrowness and rigidity of intent would be intolerable, if the tragedies were not so brief: I do not think any of them is much longer than a single act of one of Shakespeare's plays. They are in all other ways equally unlike Shakespeare's plays. When you read Macbeth or Hamlet, you find yourself in a world where the interests and passions are complex and divided against themselves, as they are here and now. The action progresses fitfully, as events do in life; it is promoted by the things that seem to retard it; and it includes long stretches of time and many places. When you read Orestes, you find yourself attendant upon an imminent calamity, which nothing can avert or delay. In a solitude like that of dreams, those hapless phantasms, dark types of remorse, of cruel ambition, of inexorable revenge, move swiftly on the fatal end. They do not grow or develop on the imagination; their character is stamped at once, and they have but to act it out. There is no lingering upon episodes, no digressions, no reliefs. They cannot stir from that spot where they are doomed to expiate or consummate their crimes; one little day is given them, and then all is over. Mr. Lowell, in his essay on Dryden, speaks of “a style of poetry whose great excellence was that it was in perfect sympathy with the genius of the people among whom it came into being”, and this I conceive to be the virtue of the Alferian poetry. The Italians love beauty of form, and we Goths love picturesque effect; and Alfieri has little or none of the kind of excellence which we enjoy. But while I look and own myself a happy Goth,