he contrary, lays upon us the obligation that we
should transfer ourselves to the stranger and accommodate ourselves to
his conditions, to his diction, and to his peculiarities. The advantages
of both are sufficiently well known to all cultured men by masterly
examples. Our friend, who here also sought the middle way, endeavored to
combine both; yet, as a man of taste and feeling, in doubtful cases he
gave the preference to the first maxim.

Perhaps no one has so keenly felt as he how complicated a task
translation is. How deeply was he convinced that not the letter but the
spirit giveth life! Consider how, in his introductions, he first
endeavors to shift us to the period and to make us acquainted with the
personages; how he then makes his author speak in a way which we already
know, akin to our own thought and familiar to our ear; and how, finally,
in his annotations, he seeks to explain and to obviate many a detail
which might remain obscure, rouse doubt, and be offensive. Through this
triple endeavor one can see clearly that he first has mastered his
subject, and then he also takes the most praiseworthy pains to put us in
a position in which his insight can be communicated to us, that we also
may share the enjoyment with him.

Although he was equally master of many tongues, yet he clung to the two
in which the value and the dignity of the ancient world have most purely
been transmitted to us. For little as we would deny that many a treasure
has been drawn and is still to be drawn from the mines of other ancient
literatures, so little shall we be contradicted when we assert that the
language of the Greeks and of the Romans has transmitted to us, down to
this very day, priceless gifts which in content are equal to the best,
and in form are superior to every other.

The organization of the German Empire, which includes so many small
states within itself, herein resembled the Greek. Since the tiniest,
most unimportant, and even invisible city had its special interests it
was constrained to cherish and to maintain them, and to defend them
against its neighbors. Accordingly, its youth were early roused and
summoned to reflect upon affairs of state. And thus Wieland, too, as the
chief of the chancery of one of the smallest imperial free-towns, was in
a position calculated to make of him a patriot and, in the best sense of
the term, a demagogue; as when later, in one such instance, he resolved
to bring down upon himself t