PREFACE.
"It is," remarks the author of The Ancient Classical Drama, referring to Euripides, "to the disgrace of English scholarship that we have no verse translation of this all-important poet produced in our own day." Though some might peradventure challenge the inference, on the plea that our scholars have been more profitably employed, the fact is indisputable. The comparative neglect of Euripides by translators for more than a century past is, indeed, one of the enigmas of English scholarship. If this were accompanied by a corresponding paucity of editions of his works, or by an increasing tendency to underrate his merits, the marvel would have at least the quality of consistency. But, on the one hand, Euripides has of late years received from commentators his full share of attention, and, on the other, nothing is more certain than that the old fashion of disparaging his genius (in which Schlegel led the way, giving all the weight of his authority to a sentence which others were too uncritical or too timorous to revise), is now utterly discredited, and that we have ceased to regard the generations of Greeks and Romans who loved and reverenced him, as degenerate fools and blind, and are at last making some humble efforts to understand them and to recover their point of view. In fact, the revived interest in Euripides has taken every form but that of doing for him what has been so freely done for Homer, Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. True, many translators have nibbled at him during the present century. The Alcestis has been translated by Banks (1849),
