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natural timidity of the female character with the animated and fiery daring of heroes, the fears of these daughters of Cadmus presenting nothing to their imagination but the scenes of distress and horror, which the insolence of conquest spreads through a vanquished and plundered city, and this painted in the warmest colours, in the strongest style of Æschylus.
Besides the intrinsic beauty of this tragedy, which is very striking, it has to us this further merit, that it gave birth to three of the finest poems of antiquity the Antigone of Sophocles, the Phœenissæ of Euripides, and the Thebaid of Statius.
