TO

_W----s, the German 'Translator' of Walladmor._

SIR,

Having some intention of speaking rather freely of you and your German
'Translation' in a postscript to the second volume of my English one--I
am shy of sending a presentation copy to Berlin: neither you, nor your
publisher, Herr Herbig, might relish all that I may take it into my
head to say. Yet, as books sometimes travel far,--if you should ever
happen to meet with mine knocking about the world in Germany, I would
wish you to know that I have endeavoured to make you what amends I
could for any little affront which I meditate in that Postscript by
dedicating my English translation to yourself.

You will be surprised to observe that your three corpulent German
volumes have collapsed into two English ones of rather consumptive
appearance. The English climate, you see, does not agree with them: and
they have lost flesh as rapidly as Captain le Harnois in Chapter the
Eighth. The truth is this: on examining your ship, I found that the dry
rot had got into her: she might answer the helm pretty well in your
milder waters; but I was convinced that upon our stormy English seas
she would founder, unless I flung overboard part of her heavy ballast,
and cut away some of her middle timbers, which (I assure you) were mere
touchwood. I did so; and she righted in a moment: and now, that I have
driven a few new bolts into her--'calked' her--and 'payed' her, I am in
hopes she will prove sea-worthy for a voyage or so.

We have a story in England, rather trite here, and a sort of
philosophic common-place, like Buridan's 'Ass between two bundles of
hay,' but possibly unknown in Germany: and, as it is pertinent to
the case between ourselves, I will tell it: the more so, as it involves
a metaphysical question; and such questions, you know, go up to
you people in Germany from all parts of Europe as to "the courts
above."----Sir John Cutler had a pair of silk stockings: which
stockings his housekeeper Dolly continually darned for the term of three
years with worsted: at the end of which term the last faint gleam of silk
had finally vanished, and Sir John's _silk_ stockings were found in their
old age absolutely to have degenerated into _worsted_ stockings. Now
upon this a question arose among the metaphysicians--whether Sir John's
stockings retained (or, if not, at what precise period they lost) their
"personal identity." The moralists also were anxi