Page:The Plays of Euripides Vol. 1- Edward P. Coleridge (1910).djvu/16

x As regards the addition of notes to this translation, the few that are given have, for the sake of the reader's convenience, been appended as footnotes, to avoid the necessity of referring continually to an appendix. They are of two kinds, dealing firstly, with variant readings and proposed emendations, and secondly, with obscure allusions; the former being by far the more numerous class.

Euripides is an author, about whom and whose writings so much has been written that a mass of notes is not only unnecessary, but apt to distract and weary the reader, who presumably wishes to know not what a commentator but what the author says and thinks. Still as there is occasionally an allusion, the elucidation of which is necessary to a full understanding of the context, a few explanatory notes have been added.

The adoption of Paley's edition as a textus receptus, has to some extent obviated the need of calling attention on every occasion to variations from the MSS., for that which he has admitted I have in the majority of instances tacitly followed; wherever I have diverged from him I have noted the fact and cited my authority for so doing; and occasionally, when unintelligible or corrupt passages occurred, more than one of the numerous emendations offered have been quoted.

There has been, and still is, in Germany, a large school of critics, who settle textual difficulties by a method only praise-worthy for its extreme simplicity; they at once pronounce spurious whatever appears to them hard to understand, and so relieve Euripides of a host of more or less time-honoured "cruces." Against such a charming plan for elucidating his author Paley resolutely sets his face, and, it may be, goes a little too far in the opposite direction in his sturdy conservatism and retention of passages almost certainly spurious or interpolated.

I do not feel called upon, in the capacity of translator, to