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THE PICCOLOMINI;

OR,

THE FIRST PART OF WALLENSTEIN.

A DRAMA.

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN OF SCHILLER.

PREFACE OF THE TRANSLATOR TO THE

FIRST EDITION.

THE two Dramas, PICCOLOMINI, or the first part of WALLENSTEIN, and WALLENSTEIN, are introduced in the original manuscript by a Prelude in one Act, entitled WALLENSTEIN's CAMP. This is written in rhyme, and in nine syllable verse, in the same lilting metre (if that expression may be permitted) with the second Eclogue of Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar.

This Prelude possesses a sort of broad humour, and is not deficient in character; but to have translated it into prose, or into any other metre than that of the original, would have given a false notion both of its style and purport; to have translated it into the same metre would have been incompatible with a faithful adherence to the sense of the German, from the comparative poverty of our language in rhymes; and it would have been unadvisable from the incongruity of those lax verses with the present taste of the English Public. Schiller's intention seems to have been merely to have prepared his reader for the Tragedies by a lively picture of the laxity of discipline, and the mutinous dispositions of Wallenstein's soldiery. It is not necessary as a preliminary explanation. For these reasons it has been thought expedient not to translate it.

The admirers of Schiller, who have abstracted their conception of that author from the Robbers, and the Cabal and Love, plays in which the main interest is produced by the excitement of curiosity, and in which the curiosity is excited by terrible and extraordinary incident, will not have perused, without some portion of disappointment, the dramas, which it has been my employment to translate. They should, however, reflect that these are historical dramas, taken from a popular German history; that we must therefore judge of

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