in order to please tender-hearted
people, I might have been less true to nature; but if a certain beetle,
of whom we have all heard, could extract filth even from pearls, if we
have examples that fire has destroyed and water deluged, shall therefore
pearls, fire, and water be condemned. In consequence of the remarkable
catastrophe which ends my play, I may justly claim for it a place among
books of morality, for crime meets at last with the punishment it
deserves; the lost one enters again within the pale of the law, and
virtue is triumphant. Whoever will but be courteous enough towards me
to read my work through with a desire to understand it, from him I may
expect--not that he will admire the poet, but that he will esteem the
honest man.
SCHILLER.
EASTER FAIR, 1781.

ADVERTISEMENT TO THE ROBBERS.

AS COMMUNICATED BY SCHILLER TO DALBERG IN 1781, AND SUPPOSED TO HAVE
BEEN USED AS A PROLOGUE.

--This has never before been printed with any of the editions.--

The picture of a great, misguided soul, endowed with every gift of
excellence; yet lost in spite of all its gifts! Unbridled passions and
bad companionship corrupt his heart, urge him on from crime to crime,
until at last he stands at the head of a band of murderers, heaps horror
upon horror, and plunges from precipice to precipice into the lowest
depths of despair. Great and majestic in misfortune, by misfortune
reclaimed, and led back to the paths of virtue. Such a man shall you
pity and hate, abhor yet love, in the Robber Moor. You will likewise
see a juggling, fiendish knave unmasked and blown to atoms in his own
mines; a fond, weak, and over-indulgent father; the sorrows of too
enthusiastic love, and the tortures of ungoverned passion. Here, too,
you will witness, not without a shudder, the interior economy of vice;
and from the stage be taught how all the tinsel of fortune fails to
smother the inward worm; and how terror, anguish, remorse, and despair
tread close on the footsteps of guilt. Let the spectator weep to-day at
our exhibition, and tremble, and learn to bend his passions to the laws
of religion and reason; let the youth behold with alarm the consequences
of unbridled excess; nor let the man depart without imbibing the lesson
that the invisible band of Providence makes even villains the
instruments of its designs and judgments, and can marvellously unravel
the most intricate perplexities of fate.

PREFACE TO THE