these may appear. If the language seem rugged, heterogeneous, perplexed, the blame is not wholly mine. Richter's style may be pronounced the most untranslateable, not in German only, but in any other modern literature.[1] Let the English reader fancy a Burton writing, not an Anatomy of Melancholy, but a foreign romance, through the scriptory organs of a Jeremy Bentham! Richter exhausts all the powers of his own most ductile language: what in him was over-strained and rude would naturally become not less but more so in the hands of his translator.
For this, and many other offences of my Author, apologies might be attempted; but much as I wish for a favourable sentence, it is not meet that Richter, in the Literary-Judgment-hall, should appear as a culprit; or solicit suffrages, which, if he cannot claim them, are unavailing. With the hundred real, and the ten thousand seeming weaknesses of his cause, a fair trial is a thing he will court rather than dread.
- ↑ The following long title of a little German Book I may quote by way of premunition: "K. Reinhold's Lexicon for Jean Paul's Works, or Explanation of all the foreign Words and unusual Modes of Speech which occur in his Writings; with short Notices of the historical Persons and Facts therein alluded to; and plain German Versions of the most difficult Passages in the Context. A necessary Assistant for all who would read those Works-with profit. First Volume, containing Levana. Leipzig, 1808." Unhappily, with this First Volume K. Reinhold seems to have stopped short. More than once, in the following pages, have I longed for his help; and been forced at last to rest satisfied with a meaning, and too imperfect a conviction that it was the right one.
