ill now and again yield a word or a phrase of felicitous precision. But
that a translation "literal at every cost" should be put into verse is a
wrong both to the original and to the poetry of the language to which
the original is transferred; it assumes a poetic garb which in assuming
it rends to tatters. A translation into verse implies that a certain
beauty of form is part of the writer's aim; it implies that a poem is to
be reproduced as a poem, and not as that bastard product of learned ill
judgment--a glorified crib; and a glorified crib is necessarily a bad
crib. Mrs Orr, who tells us that Browning refused to regard even the
first of Greek writers as models of literary style, had no doubt that
the translation of the _Agamemnon_ was partly made for the pleasure of
exposing the false claims made on their behalf. Such a supposition does
not agree well with Browning's own Preface; but if he had desired to
prove that the _Agamemnon_ can be so rendered as to be barely readable,
he has been singularly successful. From first to last in the genius of
Browning there was an element, showing itself from time to time, of
strange perversity.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 103: Was this a "baffled visit," as described by Mr Henry
James in his "Life of Story" (ii. 197), when the hostess was absent, and
the guests housed in an inn?]

[Footnote 104: Letter quoted by Mrs Orr, p. 288.]

[Footnote 105: The attitude is reproduced in a photograph from which a
woodcut is given in Mme. Blanc's article "A French Friend of Browning."]

[Footnote 106: "Records of Tennyson, Ruskin and Browning," by Annie
Ritchie, pp. 291, 292.]

[Footnote 107: "A Bibliography of the Writings of Robert Browning," by
T.J. Wise, pp. 157, 158.]

[Footnote 108: _Aristophanes' Apology_ is connected with these poems by
its character as a casuistical self-defence of the chief speaker.]

[Footnote 109: North's "Plutarch," 1579, p. 599.]

[Footnote 110: "Les Deux Masques," ii. 281.]

[Footnote 111: A comment of Paul de Saint-Victor on the silence of the
recovered Alkestis deserves to be quoted: "Hercule apprend a Admete
qu'il lui est interdit d'entendre sa voix avant qu'elle soit purifiee de
sa consecration aux Divinites infernales. J'aime mieux voir dans cette
reserve un scrupule religieux du poete laissant a la morte sa dignite
d'Ombre. Alceste a ete nitiee aux profonds mysteres de la mort; elle a
vu l'invisible, elle a entendu l'ineffable; toute parole sortie