In a passage hopelessly corrupt, and where no two editors agree in the reading, I have necessarily been reduced to the expedient of translating with a certain degree of looseness from the text of the MSS. as given by {349} WELL. Through this text, broken and disjointed as it is, the meaning glimmers with a light sufficient to guide the reader, who wishes only to arrive at the idea, without aspiring at the reconstitution of the lost grammatical form of the text; and it is a satisfaction to think that all the translators, from POT. to CON., however they may vary in single phrases, give substantially the same idea, and in a great measure the same phrase. This idea, a most important one in the Greek system of morals, is well expressed by SYM. in his note on this place--"The Chorus here moralizes and dwells on the consequences to succeeding generations of the crimes of their predecessors. He traces, as it were, a moral succession, handed down from father to son, where one transgression begets another as its inevitable result. The first parent stock was 'ὕβρις' a spirit of insolence or insubordination, breaking out into acts of outrage, the forerunner of every calamity in a Grecian republic, against which the philosophers and tragedians largely declaimed. They denounced it as well from a principle of policy as a sentiment of religion. In short, the poet treats here of the moral concatenation of cause and effect, the consequence to the descendants of their progenitors' misconduct, operating either by the force of example or of hereditary disposition, which in the mind of the Chorus produces the effect of an irresistible fatality."--I may mention that I have retained the original word δάιμων in its English form "demon," this being, according to my feeling, one of the few places where the one can be used for the other without substituting a modern, and, therefore, a false idea. Note 62 (p. 65). "Fawn with watery love." ῦδαρεῖ σάινειν φιλότητι. This is one of those bold dramatic touches which mark the hand of a Shakespere, or an Æschylus, and, by transmuting or diluting which, the translator, in my opinion, commits a capital sin. HARF., with his squeamish sensibility, has slurred over the whole passage, and even FR., like all Germans, an advocate for close translation, gives the rapid generality of "_trügend_;" MED., from carelessness, I hope, and not from principle, has sinned in the same way, and KENNEDY likewise; but I am happy in having both CON. and SYM. for my companions, when I retain a simile which is as characteristic of my author as a crooked beak is of an eagle. This note may serve for not a few similar cases, where the nice critic will do well to consult the Greek author before he blames the English translator. Note 63 (p. 67). "He might have boasted of a triple coil."