vindication is not requisite to the enlightened reader, who, I trust,
on comparing this drama with the original, will at once see all my
motives--and the dull admirer of mere verbal translation, it would be
vain to endeavour to inspire with taste by instruction.

Wholly unacquainted with the German language, a literal translation of
the "Child of Love" was given to me by the manager of Covent Garden
Theatre to be fitted, as my opinion should direct, for his stage. This
translation, tedious and vapid as most literal translations are, had
the peculiar disadvantage of having been put into our language by a
German--of course it came to me in broken English. It was no slight
misfortune to have an example of bad grammar, false metaphors and
similes, with all the usual errors of feminine diction, placed before a
female writer. But if, disdaining the construction of sentences,--the
precise decorum of the cold grammarian,--she has caught the spirit of
her author,--if, in every altered scene,--still adhering to the nice
propriety of his meaning, and still keeping in view his great
catastrophe,--she has agitated her audience with all the various
passions he depicted, the rigid criticism of the closet will be but a
slender abatement of the pleasure resulting from the sanction of an
applauding theatre.

It has not been one of the least gratifications I have received from
the success of this play, that the original German, from which it is
taken, was printed in the year 1791; and yet, that during all the
period which has intervened, no person of talents or literary knowledge
(though there are in this country many of that description, who profess
to search for German dramas) has thought it worth employment to make a
translation of the work. I can only account for such an apparent
neglect of Kotzebue's "Child of Love," by the consideration of its