1. An extract of a letter to TC from Varnhagen, dated Berlin, 12 March 1843, and copied in TC's hand. In trans. the extract reads: “The life of Jean Paul is a [word illegible] very painstaking piece of work, which I greatly prefer to the German sources from which it is drawn; thus also the Hon. Mitchell's
life of Wallenstein, which provides the nucleus from the uncritical desert of Forster's biography and, as it were, presents
it purified. The document regarding this historical figure are not yet available for a complete winding-up; for that, further
publications from the Austrian archives, or, failing these, freer points of view, must be awaited, than those which our historians
now have. Schiller the poet has without doubt correctly seized the character of Wallenstein as such, and through empathetic
creative power penetrated to the historical situation. Exactly seen, the most vigorous historian is on the whole the most
certain. The mind is always a master of circumstances and objects are formed through perception” (MS: Yale). The life of Jean
Paul was by Eliza B. Lee, and the life of Wallenstein by John Mitchell; see TC to KAVE, 5 Feb. Friedrich Christoph Förster, Wallenstein … Eine Biographie (Potsdam, 1834).
2. Mitchell, on half pay since 1827, was an unattached lt. col. He spent part of each year on the Continent and part in Edinburgh.
