Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 22 (US).djvu/144

 these may appear. If the language seem rugged, heterogeneous, perplexed, the blame is not wholly mine. Richter's style may be pronounced the most untranslateable, not in German only, but in any other modern literature. Let the English reader fancy a Burton writing, not an Anatomy of Melancholy, but a foreign romance, through the scriptory organs of a Jeremy Bentham! Richter exhausts all the powers of his own most ductile language: what in him was over-strained and rude would naturally become not less but more so in the hands of his translator.

For this, and many other offences of my Author, apologies might be attempted; but much as I wish for a favourable sentence, it is not meet that Richter, in the Literary-Judgment-hall, should appear as a culprit; or solicit suffrages, which, if he cannot claim them, are unavailing. With the hundred real, and the ten thousand seeming weaknesses of his cause, a fair trial is a thing he will court rather than dread.