FOOTNOTE TO "ADVERTISEMENT TO THE READER":
[[1]] Many literary men of Russia, Denmark, &c write indifferently in their native or the German languages.
DEDICATION
TO
W----s, the German 'Translator' of Walladmor.
SIR,
Having some intention of speaking rather freely of you and your German 'Translation' in a postscript to the second volume of my English one--I am shy of sending a presentation copy to Berlin: neither you, nor your publisher, Herr Herbig, might relish all that I may take it into my head to say. Yet, as books sometimes travel far,--if you should ever happen to meet with mine knocking about the world in Germany, I would wish you to know that I have endeavoured to make you what amends I could for any little affront which I meditate in that Postscript by dedicating my English translation to yourself.
You will be surprised to observe that your three corpulent German volumes have collapsed into two English ones of rather consumptive appearance. The English climate, you see, does not agree with them: and they have lost flesh as rapidly as Captain le Harnois in Chapter the Eighth. The truth is this: on examining your ship, I found that the dry rot had got into her: she might answer the helm pretty well in your milder waters; but I was convinced that upon our stormy English seas she would founder, unless I flung overboard part of her heavy ballast, and cut away some of her middle timbers, which (I assure you) were mere touchwood. I did so; and she righted in a moment: and now, that I have driven a few new bolts into her--'calked' her--and 'payed' her, I am in hopes she will prove sea-worthy for a voyage or so.
We have a story in England, rather trite here, and a sort of philosophic common-place, like Buridan's 'Ass between two bundles of hay,' but possibly unknown in Germany: and, as it is pertinent to the case between ourselves, I will tell it: the more so, as it involves a metaphysical question; and such questions, you know, go up to you people in Germany from all parts of Europe as to "the courts above."----Sir John Cutler had a pair of silk stockings: which stockings his housekeeper Dolly continually darned for the term of three years with worsted: at the end of which term the last faint gleam of silk had finally vanished, and Sir John's silk stockings were found in their old age absolutely to have degenerated into worsted stockings. Now upon this a question arose among the metaphysicians--whether Sir John's stockings retained (or, if not, at what precise period they lost) their "personal identity." The moralists also were anxious to know whether Sir John's stockings could be considered the same "accountable" stockings from first to last. And the lawyers put the same question in another shape by asking--whether any felony, which Sir John's stockings could be supposed to have committed in youth, might lawfully be the subject of an indictment against Sir John's stockings when superannuated: whether a legacy, left to the stockings in the second year, could be claimed by the stockings at the end of the third: and whether the worsted stockings could be sued for the debts of the silk stockings.--Some such question, I conceive, will arise upon your account of St. David's Day, as darned by myself.
But here, My good Sir, stop a moment: I must not have you interpret the precedent of Sir John and Dolly too strictly: Sir John's stockings were originally of silk, and darned with worsted: but don't conceit that to be the case here. No, no, my good Sir;--I flatter myself the case between us is just the other way: your worsted stockings it is that I have darned with silk: and the relations, which I and Dolly bear to you and Sir John, are precisely inverted.