Page:Works of Heinrich Heine 07.djvu/184

164 That which follows has perhaps the merit that it is at once a bulletin written on the field of battle during the fight, and thus bears the impress and colour of the moment. Thucydides the historian and Boccaccio the novelist have certainly left us better sketches of the kind, but I doubt whether they had sufficient calmness, while the cholera of their day was raging most terribly around, to sketch them so beautifully and in such a masterly manner as off-hand articles for the Universal Daily Gazette of Florence or Pisa.

I shall, in the following pages, remain true to a principle which I have followed from the beginning of the book, which is to change nothing and to let it be printed as it was originally written, excepting, perhaps, putting in or taking out a