PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
It was my intention to have prefixed a Life of Wallenstein to
this translation; but I found that it must either have occupied
a space wholly disproportionate to the nature of the publication,
or have been merely a meagre catalogue of events narrated not
more fully than they already are in the Play itself. The recent
translation, likewise, of Schiller's History of the Thirty Years'
War diminished the motives thereto. In the translation I endeavoured
to render my Author literally wherever I was not
prevented by absolute differences of idiom; but I am conscious
that in two or three short passages I have been guilty of dilating
the original; and, from anxiety to give the full meaning, have
weakened the force. In the metre I have availed myself of no
other liberties than those which Schiller had permitted to
himself, except the occasional breaking-up of the line by the
substitution of a trochee for an iambus; of which liberty, so
frequent in our tragedies, I find no instance in these dramas.
S. T. Coleridge.
