This attempt to give _Menander_ to the english stage is based Upon his
‘Heautontimorumenos’ as we know it through _Terence_. That play, though
marked by roman taste, is a work of high excellence; but as it stands
would be unpresentable to a christian audience, chiefly on account of
the story of _Antiphila’s_ exposure, which must deprive _Chremes_ of
sympathy. And, since the liberties which _Terence_ took with _Menander_
cannot be determined, it was but mannerly to extend the necessary
alteration, and suppress the slaves with their tedious and difficult
intrigue. Thus altered, only about one-sixth of the latin original
remains; and the play is perhaps not so sound in plot as _Terence_
made it, and is still weighted with the badness of his _Bacchis_
[_Gorgo_]; but it has the advantage of being more easily followed. The
construction of the modern stage required the opening change. All that
is beautiful in _Terence_, and therefore possibly most of what was
_Menander’s_, has been carefully preserved; and some extant fragments
of his have also found a lodging.
The metre is a line of six stresses, written according to rules of
english rhythm; and its correspondence with the latin comic trimeter
iambic is an accident. Whatever a stress may carry, it should never
be made to carry more than one long syllable with it,—the comic vein
allowing some license as to what is reckoned as long;—but as there
are no conventional, or merely metric stresses (except sometimes in
the sixth place; and in the third, when the midverse break usual in
english six-stressed verse is observed, or that place is occupied by a
proper name), the accompanying long and short syllables may have very
varied relation of position with regard to their carrying stress. Where
more than four short unstressed syllables come together, a stress is
distributed or lost; and in some conditions of rhythm this may occur
when only four short syllables come together; and this distributed
stress occurs very readily in the second, fourth, and fifth places.
Such at least seem some of the rhythmic laws, any infringement of which
must be regarded as a fault or liberty of writing: and the best has not
been made of the metre. A natural emphasizing of the sense gives all
the rhythm that is intended.
The author thinks that so much explanation is due to the reader,
because the verse is new. He has been told that it will be said by the
critics to be prose; but that if it were printed as prose, they might
pronounce it to be verse: and this is the effect aimed at; since a
comic metre which will admit colloquial speech without torturing it
must have such a loose varying rhythm.