orrectness of the penmanship. I was in
haste to get the piece ready for you; hence the double sort
of handwriting in it; hence also my forbearing to correct it.
My copyist, according to the custom of all _reforming_
caligraphers, I find, has wofully abused the spelling. To
conclude, I recommend myself and my endeavours to the
kindness of an honoured judge. I am,' &c.

'Stuttgard, 12th December 1781.

'With the change projected by your Excellency, in regard to
the publishing of my play, I feel entirely contented,
especially as I perceive that by this means two interests
that had become very alien, are again made one, without, as
I hope, any prejudice to the results and the success of my
work. Your Excellency, however, touches on some other _very_
weighty changes, which the piece has undergone from your
hands; and these, in respect of myself, I feel to be so
important, that I shall beg to explain my mind at some length
regarding them. At the outset, then, I must honestly confess
to you, I hold the projected transference of the action
represented in my play to the epoch of the _Landfried_, and
the Suppression of Private Wars, with the whole accompaniment
which it gains by this new position, as infinitely better
than mine; and must hold it so, although the whole piece
should go to ruin thereby. Doubtless it is an objection, that
in our enlightened century, with our watchful police and
fixedness of statute, such a reckless gang should have arisen
in the very bosom of the laws, and still more, have taken
root and subsisted for years: doubtless the objection is well
founded, and I have nothing to allege against it, but the
license of Poetry to raise the probabilities of the real
world to the rank of true, and its possibilities to the rank
of probable.

'This excuse, it must be owned, is little adequate to the
objection it opposes. But when I grant your Excellency so
much (and I grant it honestly, and with complete conviction),
what will follow? Simply that my play has got an ugly fault
at its birth, which fault, if I may say so, it must carry
with it to its grave, the fault being interwoven with its
very nature, and not to be removed without destruction of the
whole.

'In the first place, all my personages speak in a styl