APPENDIX.
The foregoing translation of a play which, in comparison with the other works of Æschylus, is not very widely known or admired, may appear to require some defence.
Sufficient apology might be found in the fact that, though neglected by ordinary readers of Greek, it has always been among the φωνᾶντα συνετοῖσιν—"things vocal to the wise." Critics as competent and as diverse as Mr. Keble, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Swinburne, have each testified to its deep interest. For a thoroughly appreciative estimate of its beauties, the reader may well refer to the seventeenth and twenty-third of Keble's "Prælectiones." Not even the cumbrous necessity that was imposed upon him, of lecturing on Greek poetry, to an English audience, in the Latin language, was able to obscure his sympathetic interpretation of this play. There is a peculiar religious simplicity in it which may well have commended it to the author of the "Christian Year." However this may be, "dulcissimæ illae Ἱκέτιδες" (Præl. p. 294), seem to have attracted no small part of his critical affection. Mr. Browning's compliment to the imaginary curer of "the halt and maimed Iketides" ("Christmas Eve," st. 18), is well known: Mr. Swinburne speaks of it ("Essays and Studies," p. 198), as "a glorious and hapless poem, whose godlike grace and heroic beauty so many readers have more or less passed over with half a recognition, for no fault but its misfortune"—both, if I may venture to say so, exaggerating the extent of the corruptions and difficulties; which, considerable though they are, cannot be accounted sufficient to prevent any competent reader of Greek from enjoying this drama from the first to the last line. So far as I can judge, it is, in a literary sense, distinctly easier than the "Choephoroi," though it suggests archæological problems of greater weight, perhaps, than any arising out of the latter play.
There is, however, a reason, stronger even than the admiration of
