Page:The Tragedies of Aeschylus - tr. Potter - 1812.pdf/268

accordingly drawn as a man of a brave and daring spirit, touched with the highest sense of honour, and the most religious reverence of the Gods: in such a character there could be nothing savage and ferocious; and we are pleased to find him deeply sensible of the horror of the deed which he was obliged to perpetrate, and averse to plunge his sword into the breast of his mother. "Electra's character (in the words of the critic) is that of a fierce and determined, but withal of a generous and virtuous Her motives to revenge were, principally, a strong sense of justice, and superior affection for a father; not a rooted, unnatural aversion to a mother. She acted, as appears, not from the perturbation of a tumultuous revenge, but from a fixed abhorrence of wrong, and a virtuous sense of duty." Consistently with this character, when she had given Orestes a spirited account of their father's murder, which drew him to declare his resolution to revenge it, showing at the same time some sign of remorse, she adds a short relation of the barbarous indignities offered to the dead body; a deed of horror which, she knew, would shock his soul. She had seen her father murdered, his body mangled, and buried without its honours; her brother, whom she loved with the tenderest affection, deprived of his throne, and exiled from his country; her mother in the arms of Ægisthus abandoning herself to her loose and infamous pleasures; she was herself continually exposed to the insults