PREFACE.

A COPY of Mr. Paley's Eschylus, which came in my way some time since, has occasioned the present publication. One small portion, indeed, of the play, as here translated, made its appearance many years ago in the pages of a magazine which was at the time largely devoted to the interesting and most useful topic of parallel or comparative translation. The version alluded to was made from the then deservedly popular edition of Dr. Blomfield, an edition which, whether regard be had to the seasonableness of its appearance or its own intrinsic merit, is worthy of all praise: how worthy let those say who remember the use made of Eschylus in the schools before and after the publication of Dr. Blomfield's five plays.

To be sensible of and to acknowledge this, it is not at all necessary to unfairly depreciate the edition of Schütz, issued by Mr. Bliss of Oxford, nor yet Dr. Butler's elaborate and comprehensive republication of Stanley's Eschylus. But when one looks to the text, whether of the first or subsequent editions by Dr. Blomfield-to the notes, and, above all, to the appended glossaries—common fairness and honesty must award to the learned editor the palm of superiority over all his predecessors in the good work. So good indeed are the fragments of his

edition (fragments, however, complete in themselves), that it would seem a signal oversight in the delegates of the Clarendon Press to have missed the opportunity of doing a graceful and serviceable act in having that edition of Dr. Blomfield finished by the publication, after the same manner, of the two concluding plays. It would have been on the part of Oxford a graceful recognition of her debt to Cambridge for originating so capital a series, and would surely have proved as advantageous an undertaking as the editions since superintended by Dindorf.

It is no part of my business now to criticise the editions which I have used, and from almost all of which might have been drawn much valuable matter. I am simply specifying out of the number those from which I have derived the greatest amount of service; and these are certainly the edition of Stanley's Eschylus' by Dr. Butler, that of Dr. Blomfield, and, last, not least, the first and second of Mr. Paley. The delight with which, after an interval of some time, I read through Mr. Paley's edition issued in a desire, or, as "Glorious John" used to call it, "a hot fit," to revise the portion translated, and to complete the English version of this play.

In doing this I have conformed many renderings, about which I had hitherto hesitated, to the corrected readings of Mr. Paley's text. The eye of the scholar, the heart of the poet, and the hand of a first-rate annotator, combine to fix Mr. Paley and his edition in the chief seat at the Eschylean Board. Of course it is not by this implied that he is followed implicitly in every

instance, nor indeed in any unquestioningly. It is no compliment, or but a very poor one, to an editor and modest man of research, whose special tact is exercised in the cross-examination of others, to have all his own conclusions swallowed wholly and unenquiringly. With all his poetry, an Editor must look at the vivid pictures before him through the glasses of cooler criticism, and even measure them, in their minutiæ, by a certain ascertainable standard of fact or extreme probability; while a Translator (with all the discrimination which he has, or ought to have, as to textual reading and matters of verbal and even literal criticism) cannot but read with the spirit the lines that speak to his soul.

This must be pre-eminently the case with a translator of Eschylus. The only question with him is how far his re-utterance of the deep things so suggested to him can find their echo in the heart and understanding of those to whom he is addressing himself.

And distinct classes of auditors there are to whom the translators of Eschylus do address themselves. For instance, to the notice of students and scholars in the strictest sense of the words are the versions of Dr. Kennedy, Mr. Sewell, and Mr. Conington specially and primarily commended. They serve as tried interpreters, repeating honestly, learnedly, and picturesquely the sentences they receive from "the Master." This is their purpose, and to have achieved it-this is their praise. On the contrary, Mr. Symmons, listening, as it were, to the words of Eschylus while his eye and mind are fixed on Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Ford, and Massinger, with the rest of the old dramatic brotherhood, starts up from the inspiration of the Anglican worthies to repeat in their

well-known phrase and fashion the utterance of the great Athenian. And very nobly has Mr. Symmons fulfilled his mission in this particular. Sent to be an interpreter for the Many-for the educated lovers of English literature, as distinguished from the students of Greek-he has wrought out his purpose well. He has shown that the Greek dramatists are not those stiff, cold formalists that they laboured under the discredit of being in the estimation of those who knew them only by report, or in the respective but scarcely respectable versions of Franklin, Potter, and Michael Woodhull-to say nothing of the partial and fragmentary translations of Euripides by Banister and Gilbert West. In Symmons's version Eschylus talks as he should do, like a freeman, though it may be that his language smacks more of London than Athens, of English than Argolick citizenship. Had Mr. Symmons gone through the plays, and revised his translation of the Agamemnon, nothing else could have been needed for the English reader's enjoyment of Eschylus to the full. As it is, no doubt some of the Anglican amplifications are questionable as to taste, while the total disregard of metrical parallelism in the choral hymns may be fairly excepted against as a gratuitous violation of a set system; and this, but with all deference to such masters in the mystery of translation, I venture to say, notwithstanding the avowal of Mr. Donaldson (p. x of his preface to the Antigone) and his practice in the body of the play, corroborating that of Mr. Symmons. For, whatever measures might be adopted to represent particular portions of the dialogue or choruses of the plays -and of this the taste of the translator must be the judge, and the genius of the language his guide - it does