Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1894) v1.djvu/18

xiv have been condemned on aesthetic grounds by scholars whose censures are of too much weight in the student-world to be passed by in silence, to the briefest possible explanation of some of the less obvious allusions, and to the quotation of a few parallel passages which, not being noted by others, seemed to me peculiarly apposite, or which justified unfamiliar usages of words, or which appeared to me to lend the countenance of authority beyond all challenge to expressions to which editors have taken exception as being unnatural, undignified, or inappropriate.

I have, like other translators, occasionally worked in, without special acknowledgment, a phrase from the Bible, from Shakspeare, Milton, or some other immortal, which has now entered into the warp and woof of cultured speech, and which affects the reader with a pleasant thrill of recognition, helping him to realize how the Muses have sometimes touched to the same fine issues great souls dwelling far apart.

In a few instances I have found, on subsequent comparison, that my literal rendering of the whole or a portion of a line has precisely coincided with that of some previous translator. In such cases the identity, being purely accidental, is interesting rather than irritating, and I have made no alteration: indeed, the wonder rather is that versions which in the blank-verse dialogue are so frequently word-for-word renderings, should so seldom slip into these verbal coincidences.

In the lyrical parts of the plays I have marked the distinction of Strophe and Antistrophe, and observed the metrical correspondences therein involved, not as from a pedantic subservience to a detail which some might imagine to have little interest for the English reader, nor yet as a tour de force of metrical and rhyming ingenuity, but for a reason which, though perfectly familiar to the scholar, may require a little explanation for the non-classical reader. We should have a