at
I consulted it only very rarely. I do not think that I am under obligation
to it in more than a half-dozen scattered lines of my text. (Perhaps,
however, my use of _foray_ as a translation of _zajazd_ is due to an
unconscious recollection of the title of Miss Biggs's volumes, which I
looked over several years ago, before I had even formed the plan of my own
work.) In my notes, however, my debt to Miss Biggs and her collaborators
in her commentary on _Pan Tadeusz_ is important; I have striven to
indicate it distinctly, and I thank Miss Biggs heartily for her kind
permission to make use of her work.

To my friend Miss Mary Helen Sznyter I am grateful for aid and advice in
the rendering of several puzzling passages. But my greatest debt I owe to
my wife, whose name, if justice were done, should be added to my own as
joint translator of the volume. Though she is entirely unacquainted with
the Polish language, nearly every page of the book in its phrasing bears
traces of her correcting hand. The preparation of the volume for the press
and the reading of the proof have been made easy by her skilful help.

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA,

_December 9_, 1916.

INTRODUCTION

"No European nation of our day has such an epic as _Pan Tadeusz_. In it
_Don Quixote_ has been fused with the _Iliad_. The poet stood on the
border line between a vanishing generation and our own. Before they died,
he had seen them; but now they are no more. That is precisely the epic
point of view. Mickiewicz has performed his task with a master's hand; he
has made immortal a dead generation, which now will never pass away. {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}
_Pan Tadeusz_ is a true epic. No more can be said or need be said."(1)

This verdict upon the great masterpiece of all Slavic poetry, written a
few years after its appearance, by Zygmunt Krasinski, one of Mickiewicz's
two great successors in the field of Polish letters, has been confirmed by
the judgment of posterity. For the chapter on _Pan Tadeusz_ by George
Brandes, than whom there have been few more competent judges of modern
European literature, is little more than an expansion of Krasinski's pithy
sentences. The cosmopolitan critic echoes the patriotic Pole when he
writes: "In _Pan Tadeusz_ Poland possesses the only successful epic our
century has produced."(2)

Still more important than the praises of the finest literary critics is
the enthusias