Though twenty years have passed since the first appearance
of the "Breitmann Ballads" in a collected form, the author is
deeply gratified -- and not less sincerely grateful to the public
-- in knowing that Hans still lives in many memories, that he
continues to be quoted when writers wish to illustrate an
exuberantly joyous "barty" or ladies so very fashionably dressed
as to recall "de maidens mit nodings on," and that no
inconsiderable number of those who are "beginning German"
continue to be addressed by sportive friends in the Breitmann
dialect as a compliment to their capacity as linguists. For as a
young medical student is asked by anxious intimates if he has got
as far as salts, I have heard inquiries addressed to tyros in
Teutonic whether they had mastered these songs. As I have
realised all of this from newspapers and novels, even during the
past few weeks, and have learned that a new and very expensive
edition of the work has just appeared in America, I trust that I
may be pardoned for a self-gratulation, which is, after all
really gratitude to those who have demanded of the English
publisher another issue. My chief pleasure in this -- though it
be mingled with sorrow -- is, that it enables me to dedicate to
the memory of my friend the late NICHOLAS TRUBNER the most
complete edition of the Ballads ever printed. I can think of no
more appropriate tribute to his memory, since he was not only the
first publisher of the work in England, but collaborated with the
author in editing it so far as to greatly improve and extend the
whole. This is more fully set forth in the Introduction to the
Glossary, which is all his own. The memory of the deep personal
interest which he took in the poems, his delight in being their
publisher, his fondness for reciting them, is and ever will be to
me indescribably touching; such experiences being rare in any