ΤΟ Per Highness THE PRINCESS MARY ESTERHAZY, THIS VOLUME 18, By Permission, MOST RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED. PREFACE. THE GOLDEN LYRE was undertaken as well from a wish to shew the progress of a new and beautiful Art, as to supply a volume of agreeable and diversified reading for the student of Foreign Literature. In both respects we are happy to acknowledge the success of our enterprise, and trust, under such favorable auspices, to proceed, from year to year, with increased claims to public approbation. In the selection of pieces in the Spanish language, now for the first time introduced, we have much pleasure in acknowledging our obligations to the correct taste of a learned native-Don Muñoz de Sotomayor. We have only a few words to add, expressive of our satisfaction at witnessing such proofs that the literature of the great and powerful nations of the Coutinent is beginning to be better appreciated amongst us. Nations that thus learn to know and esteem each other-whose great writers become, as it were, enshrined in the hearts and affections of the most cultivated and influential classes-will surely be anxious to draw still closer the sacred bands that unite them in peace and amity; and for how much, not merely of moral and intellectual grandeur, but of ordinary, every-day happiness, is not the world indebted to the gentle and humanizing pages of a Cowper, a Delille, a Schiller, a Monti, or a Luis de Leon! |