hold it needless to afflict your Excellency
with any _importuning picture_ of my want. Speedy aid is all
that I can now think of or wish. Herr Meyer has been
requested to communicate your Excellency's resolution to me,
and to save you from the task of writing to me in person at
all. With peculiar respect, I call myself,' &c.

* * * * *

It is pleasing to record that the humble aid so earnestly and modestly
solicited by Schiller, was afforded him; and that he never forgot to
love the man who had afforded it; who had assisted him, when
assistance was of such essential value. In the first fervour of his
gratitude, for this and other favours, the poet warmly declared that
'he owed all, all to Dalberg;' and in a state of society where
Patronage, as Miss Edgeworth has observed, directly the antipodes of
Mercy, is in general 'twice cursed,' cursing him that gives and him
that takes, it says not a little for the character both of the obliged
and the obliger in the present instance, that neither of them ever
ceased to remember their connexion with pleasure. Schiller's first
play had been introduced to the Stage by Dalberg, and his last was
dedicated to him.[69] The venerable critic, in his eighty-third year,
must have received with a calm joy the tragedy of _Tell_, accompanied
by an address so full of kindness and respect: it must have gratified
him to think that the youth who was once his, and had now become the
world's, could, after long experience, still say of him,

And fearlessly to thee may _Tell_ be shown,
For every noble feeling is thy own.

[Footnote 69: It clearly appears I am wrong here; I have
confounded the Freiherr Wolfgang Heribert von Dalberg,
Director of the Mannheim Theatre, with Archduke and _Fuerst
Primas_ Karl Theodor Dalberg, his younger Brother,--a man
justly eminent in the Politico-Ecclesiastical world of his
time, and still more distinguished for his patronage of
letters, and other benefactions to his country, than the
Freiherr was. Neither is the play of _Tell_ 'dedicated' to
him, as stated in the text; there is merely a copy presented,
with some verses by the Author inscribed in it; at which time
Karl Theodor was in his _sixtieth_ year. A man of conspicuous
station, of wide activity, and high influence and esteem in
Germany. He was the personal friend of Herder, Goethe,
Schiller