consideration,

Dear sir, yours truly,
BUNSEN.

TO THOMAS CONSTABLE, ESQ.

PREFACE BY CHEVALIER BUNSEN.

THE HISTORY AND SPIRIT OF THE BOOK.

Since our German literature attained maturity, no novel has achieved a
reputation so immediate, or one so likely to increase and to endure, as
_Soll und Haben_, by Gustav Freytag. In the present, apparently
apathetic tone and temper of our nation, a book must be of rare
excellence which, in spite of its relatively high price (15s.), has
passed through six editions within two years; and which, notwithstanding
the carping criticism of a certain party in Church and State, has won
most honorable recognition on every hand. To form a just conception of
the hold the work has taken of the hearts of men in the educated middle
rank, it needs but to be told that hundreds of fathers belonging to the
higher industrious classes have presented this novel to their sons at
the outset of their career, not less as a work of national interest than
as a testimony to the dignity and high importance they attribute to the
social position they are called to occupy, and to their faith in the
future that awaits it.

The author, a man about fifty years of age, and by birth a Silesian, is
editor of the _Grenz-bote_ (Border Messenger), a highly-esteemed
political and literary journal, published in Leipsic. His residence
alternates between that city and a small estate near Gotha. Growing up
amid the influences of a highly cultivated family circle, and having
become an accomplished philologist under Lachmann, of Berlin, he early
acquired valuable life-experience, and formed distinguished social
connections. He also gained reputation as an author by skillfully
arranged and carefully elaborated dramatic compositions--the weak point
in the modern German school.

The enthusiastic reception of his novel can not, however, be attributed
to these earlier labors, nor to the personal influence of its author.
The favor of the public has certainly been obtained in great measure by
the rare intrinsic merit of the composition, in which we find aptly
chosen and melodious language, thoroughly artistic conception, life-like
portraiture, and highly cultivated literary taste. We see before us a
national and classic writer, not one of those mere journalists who count
nowadays in Germany for men of letters.

The story, very unpretending in its opening, soon expands and becomes
more exciting, always increasing in