Natural, unconstrained verse can, with proper care, it is thought, be written in English, and can certainly, with appropriate training, be delivered with naturalness. This done, our audiences would no doubt take kindly to the rhythm of plays in verse. But, as this does not yet seem to have been fully accomplished, the undersigned translator of "Cyrano de Bergerac" reluctantly decided to use both verse and prose. For this liberty, though justified as above, he feels that he owes the French poet an apology, adding, however, that the deed brought its own punishment, since, strange as it may appear to some, it would have been much easier to render the play all in verse. As to verse and metrics, on which, in this instance, a book could (and later, may) be written, the author of this translation must now rest satisfied with the following brief remarks. Enlightened by considerable experience, the result of many experiments and after much thought, he adopted blank pentameter as the true equivalent in English of French riming Alexandrine verse. First, because in English, frequent elisions making many syllables heavy, and "run on" lines practically adding to the number of syllables, the ten-syllable line of English verse is in reality the counterpart of the twelve-syllable verse in French. And second, because the object of rime being, not to repeat a given sound, but to _beat time_, the strongly accentuated syllables of English, as compared with the very much more even enunciation of French, are quite sufficient, without rime or assonance, to _mark rhythm_. Thus he avoided at least one criticism, to wit: rime is monotonous! Touching metrics, the writer will here go only one step in the ways of heresy, by stating that, in his opinion, such words as "our," "hour," "fire," etc., should be, as in French, "duel," "hier," etc., counted for one syllable, or for two syllables, according to rhythm as influenced by the stronger or weaker emphasis called for by the _sense_ of the word. This could be elucidated by examples, the place of which, however, is not here. More generally as to methods, the writer makes free to state that, exerting himself to avoid _literal_ translation (too often productive of laughable nonsense), and _free_ translation (frequently a substitution of the translator's for the author's thoughts), he endeavoured, as in previous works of the same nature, to give what he has termed an _equivalent_ translation. In other words, he strove to remain really true to the original by creating in detail, as well as in a general way, in English words on English minds the _impression_ caused by French words on French minds. Some examples of the _equivalence_ at least sought for will be found in the foot-notes on several pages of this book.