This tragedy of _Wallenstein_, published at the close of the eighteenth century, may safely be rated as the greatest dramatic work of which that century can boast. France never rose into the sphere of Schiller, even in the days of her Corneille: nor can our own country, since the times of Elizabeth, name any dramatist to be compared with him in general strength of mind, and feeling, and acquired accomplishment. About the time of _Wallenstein's_ appearance, we of this gifted land were shuddering at _The Castle Spectre_! Germany, indeed, boasts of Goethe: and on some rare occasions, it must be owned that Goethe has shown talents of a higher order than are here manifested; but he has made no equally regular or powerful exertion of them: _Faust_ is but a careless effusion compared with _Wallenstein_. The latter is in truth a vast and magnificent work. What an assemblage of images, ideas, emotions, disposed in the most felicitous and impressive order! We have conquerors, statesmen, ambitious generals, marauding soldiers, heroes, and heroines, all acting and feeling as they would in nature, all faithfully depicted, yet all embellished by the spirit of poetry, and all made conducive to heighten one paramount impression, our sympathy with the three chief characters of the piece.[35] [Footnote 35: _Wallenstein_ has been translated into French by M. Benjamin Constant; and the last two parts of it have been faithfully rendered into English by Mr. Coleridge. As to the French version, we know nothing, save that it is an _improved_ one; but that little is enough: Schiller, as a dramatist, improved by M. Constant, is a spectacle we feel no wish to witness. Mr. Coleridge's translation is also, as a whole, unknown to us: but judging from many large specimens, we should pronounce it, excepting Sotheby's _Oberon_, to be the best, indeed the only sufferable, translation from the German with which our literature has yet been enriched.]