Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/15

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PREFACE.
xiii

sions, I have endeavoured to preserve the symmetry in question throughout.

(3.) In another less conspicuous matter I have also to acknowledge a change of opinion. In the first edition I, for the most part, deliberately broke up the single-line dialogues, the στιχομυθίαι, which occur in every tragedy, into less regular lines and half lines, more in harmony with the forms of most of our English dramas. Here again, I believe, it would have been better to have been more faithful to the form of the original. Mr Swinburne's success in these portions of his Atalanta in Calydon has shown that it is quite possible to do so, and yet to escape the stiffness and monotony which at first seem almost inevitable.

(4.) Admitting the force of much that may be said on the conservative side, in favour of retaining any received nomenclature and orthography, I have not seen reason to recede from the course which I took in the first edition, and have, in some instances, gone further in the same direction. It still seems to me right to give Greek mythology as it actually was, and not as it was seen through the medium of the speech of men who were bent upon identifying two polytheistic systems which were but partially in contact with each other. The more I compare the effect produced