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moral tendency is not always sufficient to excuse. These, however, are the peculiarities of the German language, and also of the German school, for which the English reader must be prepared to make allowance. Perhaps in no play of Schiller's, has he more fully exhibited the faults as well as the beauties of his style, and it is no small motive with the translator in offering the present version to the public, to place Both in juxta-position, for the benefit of those, who may desire to imitate the one, and to avoid the other.

There is a feeling and imagination about Schiller, that give, even to his prose, all the glow and character of poetry. The Translator has sought to meet this, by rendering the more elevated and less conversational scenes in blank verse, a liberty for which he might plead the highest authority, were he not afraid that this would only expose his temerity to increased condemnation. It is now too late to remember that the Enchanter's wand replies only to the touch of the Enchanter, and loses its mystic virtue in unhallowed hands!

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For the rest, the Translator is too painfully alive to his own deficiencies, to seek to disarm criticism by an affected modesty, or to invite it by unbecoming presumption. None can understand the difficulties he has had to contend with, but They who are acquainted with the German language; who are conversant with the boldness of its imagery, the energy of its declamation, the concentrated force of its compound words, and the winged beauty of its many coloured and ever varying epithets.

To the considerate indulgence of Those, he fearlessly commits himself, while he ventures to remind his severer Judges, that the office of a Translator although humble, is not mean, if, like an inferior Artist who copies from a Master, he shall succeed in giving only an accurate outline of his original, while he leaves it to the taste and imagination of the Reader, to finish and fill up the glowing Picture.

THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

THE Account of this Conspiracy has been taken principally from "La Conjuration du Comte Jean Louis de Fiesque, by the Cardinal de Retz, from L'Histoire des Conjurations, L'Histoire de Genes, and from Robertson's History of Charles V. Vol. 3. The Hamburgh Dramatist will readily forgive the liberties I have used with the original narrative, provided these liberties have succeeded. If they have failed, I can only rejoice that I have sacrificed, on this occasion, my own inventions, in preference to historical facts.

It was necessary to alter entirely the real catastrophe, in which the Count, by an unex

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pected accident, is deprived of life at the moment he has attained the completion of his wishes, because the nature of the Drama does not admit the finger of Chance or the immediate and visible interposition of Providence, in the accomplishment of its objects. I should have been surprised, indeed, that no Tragic Writer has hitherto made choice of this subject, if I did not find a solution of the difficulty in this undramatic termination.

Superior Intelligence, where Man sees only the insulated fact, contemplates every action in its finest and most delicate ramifications, tracks its influence throughout the system, and connects by its consequences, the future with the past: but the Artist must adapt his views to the shortsightedness of Humanity which he is desirous to instruct, not to the wisdom of Providence to which he bows.

In my "Robbers" I have chosen for a subject the victim of a diseased and morbid sensibility. Here I have fixed upon its opposite, the victim of artifice and intrigue, for an example. But in