While our friend occupies himself with the works of both these men, how gladly would he transport himself back into their century and their surroundings, and transfer himself to their epoch, in order to transmit to us a clear picture of that past; and he succeeds amazingly.  Perhaps, on the whole, more sympathy might be desired for the men with whom he is concerned, but such is his fear of partisanship that he prefers to take sides against them rather than on their behalf.

There are two maxims of translation.  The one demands that the author of an alien nation be brought over to us so that we may regard him as our own; the other, on the 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 the temporary disfavor of his patron, the neighboring Count Stadion, rather than to make an unpatriotic submission.