'In the original, the Robbers are exhibited in strong contrast with each other; and I dare maintain that it is difficult to draw half a dozen robbers in strong contrast, without in some of them offending the delicacy of the stage. In my first conception of the piece, I excluded the idea of its ever being represented in a theatre; hence came it that Franz was planned as a _reasoning_ villain; a plan which, though it may content the thinking Reader, cannot fail to vex and weary the Spectator, who does not come to think, and who wants not philosophy, but action. 'In the new edition, I could not overturn this arrangement without breaking-down the whole economy of the piece. Accordingly I can predict, with tolerable certainty, that Franz when he appears on the stage, will not play the part which he has played with the reader. And, at all events, the rushing stream of the action will hurry the spectator over all the finer shadings, and rob him of a third part of the whole character. 'Karl von Moor might chance to form an era on the stage; except a few speculations, which, however, work as indispensable colours in the general picture, he is all action, all visible life. Spiegelberg, Schweitzer, Hermann, are, in the strictest sense, personages for the stage; in a less degree, Amelia and the Father. 'Written and oral criticisms I have endeavoured to turn to advantage. The alterations are important; certain scenes are altogether new. Of this number, are Hermann's counter-plots to undermine the schemes of Franz; his interview with that personage, which, in the first composition of the work, was entirely and very unhappily forgotten. His interview with Amelia in the garden has been postponed to the succeeding act; and my friends tell me that I could have fixed upon no better act than this, no better time than a few moments prior to the meeting of Amelia with Moor. Franz is brought a little nearer human nature; but the mode of it is rather strange. A scene like his condemnation in the fifth act has never, to my knowledge, been exhibited on any stage; and the same may be said of the scene where Amelia is sacrificed by her lover. 'If the piece should be too long, it stands at the discretion of the manager to abbreviate the speculative parts of it, or here and there, without prejudice to the general impression, to omit them altogether. But in the _printing_, I use the freedom humbly to protest against the leaving out of anything. I had satisfactory reasons of my own for all that I allowed to pass; and my submission to the stage does not extend so far, that I can leave _holes_ in my work, and mutilate the characters of men for the convenience of actors.