My admiration of Aeschylus has been prodigiously increased by this reperusal.

I cannot conceive how any person of the smallest pretension to taste should doubt about his immeasurable superiority to every poet of antiquity, Homer only excepted.

Even Milton, I think, must yield to him.

It is quite unintelligible to me that the ancient critics should have placed him so low.

Horace's notice of him in the Ars Poetica is quite ridiculous.
There is, to be sure, the "magnum loqui;" but the great topic insisted on is the skill of Aeschylus as a manager, as a property-man; the judicious way in which he boarded the stage; the masks, the buskins, and the dresses.
["Post hunc personae pallaeque repertor honestae Aeschylus et modicis instravit pulpita tignis, Et docuit magnumnque loqui, nitique cothuruo."] And, after all, the "magnum loqui," though the most obvious characteristic of Aeschylus, is by no means his highest or his best.