n our own country,
since the times of Elizabeth, name any dramatist to be compared with
him in general strength of mind, and feeling, and acquired
accomplishment. About the time of _Wallenstein's_ appearance, we of
this gifted land were shuddering at _The Castle Spectre_! Germany,
indeed, boasts of Goethe: and on some rare occasions, it must be owned
that Goethe has shown talents of a higher order than are here
manifested; but he has made no equally regular or powerful exertion of
them: _Faust_ is but a careless effusion compared with _Wallenstein_.
The latter is in truth a vast and magnificent work. What an assemblage
of images, ideas, emotions, disposed in the most felicitous and
impressive order! We have conquerors, statesmen, ambitious generals,
marauding soldiers, heroes, and heroines, all acting and feeling as
they would in nature, all faithfully depicted, yet all embellished by
the spirit of poetry, and all made conducive to heighten one paramount
impression, our sympathy with the three chief characters of the
piece.[35]

[Footnote 35: _Wallenstein_ has been translated into French
by M. Benjamin Constant; and the last two parts of it have
been faithfully rendered into English by Mr. Coleridge. As to
the French version, we know nothing, save that it is an
_improved_ one; but that little is enough: Schiller, as a
dramatist, improved by M. Constant, is a spectacle we feel no
wish to witness. Mr. Coleridge's translation is also, as a
whole, unknown to us: but judging from many large specimens,
we should pronounce it, excepting Sotheby's _Oberon_, to be
the best, indeed the only sufferable, translation from the
German with which our literature has yet been enriched.]

Soon after the publication of _Wallenstein_, Schiller once more
changed his abode. The 'mountain air of Jena' was conceived by his
physicians to be prejudicial in disorders of the lungs; and partly in
consequence of this opinion, he determined henceforth to spend his
winters in Weimar. Perhaps a weightier reason in favour of this new
arrangement was the opportunity it gave him of being near the theatre,
a constant attendance on which, now that he had once more become a
dramatist, seemed highly useful for his farther improvement. The
summer he, for several years, continued still to spend in Jena; to
which, especially its beautiful environs, he declared himself
particularly attached. His little garden-house