Page:Life of Jean Paul Frederic Richter (Lee).djvu/13

 PREFACE

TO THE FIRST EDITION.

HE following pages are presented to the reader as containing an authentic life of Jean Paul, although they are not a literal translation of any one of the biographies of the great German Poet.

It is well known that he was the most frank and unreserved of authors, and that he has interwoven, in all his romances, much of his personal experience. When, in the latter part of his life, he began his great comic romance of Nicholas Margraf, or Poetry from the Life of an Apothecary, he undertook, at the same time, as a parallel or companion piece, his Autobiography, or Truth from my own Life, intending to interweave the two, as the romance and reality of one life. Hence results the comic tone, and the apparent affectation of speaking in the third person in his Autobiogra-