where I was educated, and contradicted the plan of its founder. For eight years my enthusiasm struggled with military discipline; but the pas for poetry is vehement and fiery as a first ve What discipline was meant to extinguish, 4 blew into a flame. To escape from arrange. nts that tortured me, my heart sought refuge the world of ideas, when as yet I was unwonted with the world of realities, from wach iron bars excluded me. I was unacquainted with men; for the four hundred that lived with were but repetitions of the same creature, arate casts of one single mould, and of that ry mould that plastic nature solemnly discamel."

DOCETS AND DIFFICULTIES; FLIGHT TO
MANNHEIM.

Schiller was about nineteen years old when he wrote the play, but so long as he remained a tent at the Carlschule he was obliged to Lep the manuscript to himself. When he had

ted his medical studies, however, and had appointed surgeon to the Würtemberg regiaat Aage, he ventured to publish it, and the et it created throughout Germany was im

While none could doubt that a great had arisen, many were staggered at the ngances mingled with true touches of subty and pathos. Some even saw danger to

morality in the exhibition of a gang of laws, for whose leader the author enlists the sympathy of his audience.

The young poet might have looked with inHence on unfounded censure and on exagred praise; but now a voice was heard which ala far more material bearing on his well

that of the Grand Duke. By the terms of the atacational contract entered into for him by a father, Schiller was emphatically the servant f the Grand Duke, whose behests he was bound obey. That great potentate could find no in the Robbers, but, on the other hand, he Each there of a dangerous "liberal” tenry. He therefore called Schiller before him, sked him, and dismissed him with an emphatic Action to write nothing more, except on albjects; or, if he produced any poetry, to hit his work to the criticism of His High1 Bchiller was in a painful strait. On the De band, there was the voice within him urging

to be up and doing, with a heart for any baie conscious of his power and genius, to recace poetry was to give up all that made life ble. On the other hand, his father, the turdy old captain, with his wife and daughters,

was entirely dependent on the favour of the Grand Duke. Meanwhile his play was put on the stage at Mannheim, and was applauded to the echo. The young author came secretly to Mannheim to witness the first representation of the tragedy. A second visit was punished by military arrest, and things began to look very black for the poet. For it must be remembered that Germany had no Habeas Corpus Act. Personal liberty was not guarded as in England, by legal enactment, and the man who offended the authorities might find himself suddenly arrested, and immured in a fortress, without formal accusation, trial, or sentence. Such had been the fate of Daniel Schubart, a poor erratic poet and musician, very thoughtless and eccentric, and much given to convivial excess in the wines of the Rhineland and Franconia, but as harmless as La Fontaine or John Gay. But Schubart was a newspaper editor, a dangerous calling in a despotic country; and he had offended an Austrian general, the imperial agent at Ulm, by refusing to play on a bad harpsichord, for which that magnanimous officer vowed revenge. Accordingly, when Schubart inserted in his newspaper a report that the Empress-Queen Maria Theresa had been struck by apoplexy, Reid demanded the exemplary punishment of the unlucky poet, who was arrested by a stratagem, conveyed to Hohenasperg, a fortress near Stuttgart, and kept a close prisoner for nine years. The first was passed in confinement in a subterraneous dungeon, under such conditions of cruelty that the captive nearly escaped his tormentors by death. Afterwards some slight alleviation was granted him, and he found a friend in his gaoler, who had himself experienced the tender mercies of the paternal Government of Würtemberg, having been once a prisoner himself. "For four years he had seen no human face; his scanty food had been lowered to him through a trapdoor; neither chair nor table was allowed him, his cell was never swept, his beard and nails were left to grow, the humblest conveniences of civilized humanity were denied to him."

Schiller had once seen Schubart in his prison at Hohenasperg, and the probability of a similar fate so haunted him, that at last he made up his mind to seek safety in flight. In September, 1782, there were to be grand doings in the good Residenz-Stadt, Stuttgart. The Grand Duke Paul (afterwards the mad Emperor of Russia) was to be received there, with his bride, a niece of the Duke of Würtemberg. Schiller took advantage of the bustle and confusion attending a grand illumination of the Palace of "Solitude" on the evening of the 17th, and with a faithful friend,

a young musician named Streicher, fled in a postchaise from Stuttgart.

His immediate destination was Mannheim, where he hoped to establish himself as salaried poet to the theatre, which was under the direction of Baron Dalberg, a man of considerable mental cultivation and great influence. It must be remembered that theatres in the principal towns were then, as they have since continued to be, under state supervision and control, and were looked upon somewhat in the light of public educational institutions. Schiller began by offer. ing Dalberg the manuscript of a second tragedy he had just written, Fiesco, or the Revolt of Genoa, concerning which they had already been in correspondence; but the cautious director, knowing the dangerous position of the distressed poet, who was living in doubt and poverty at Mannheim, trembling lest the Duke should demand his extradition, first declared that the piece must be remodeiled to make it fit for the stage, and when this had been done, still refused to receive it.

FRIENDS IN NEED; PERSEVERANCE;

DAWNING OF BETTER TIMES.

Fortunately, Schiller had made the acquaintance of a wealthy bookseller, Schwan, who purchased the manuscript of Fiesco at the rate of a louis d'or per sheet, about eight pounds sterling for the whole tragedy.

His embarrassments were for a time stopped by the cordial help and friendship of a Frau von Walzogen, one of the kindest of ladies, the mother of Wilhelm von Wolzogen, a fellow-student of Schiller's at the Carlschule. This good Samaritan now offered the poet an asylum in her country house at Bauerbach, near Meinungen, and here for some time the fugitive remained in retirement, under the name of Dr. Ritter. His time was not wasted. During the eight months of his residence at Bauerbach, he wrote his third tragedy, Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love).

"Everything comes at last to him who knows how to wait," says the French proverb. Schiller's horizon was gradually clearing, and signs of better times appeared. The Duke had given no sign of any disposition to pursue the fugitive, whose place as army-surgeon had been quietly filled up; nor had good old Captain Schiller been annoyed in any way. Then cautious Dalberg took courage and re-opened negotiations; and it was arranged that Schiller was to be engaged as theatre-poet at Mannheim for a salary of 500 gulden, or £50 a year. For some time he continued to be worried, not exactly like Hogarth's

distressed poet, by demands for a milk-score, but by debts of various kinds that hung round his neck like a millstone. Sturdy Captain Schiller, whose income did not amount to £50 a year, managed, though not without some natural growling, to give him occasional assistance: a draft of £10, to pay which it was necessary to break into a fund he had saved for his daughter's outfit, seems to have especially annoyed the good old father, who could, moreover, never quite recon. cile himself to the idea that his son had run away; and considered that "a theatre-poet in Germany was but a small light."

Indeed, the captain was exceedingly desirous to have the wanderer back again in Würtemberg, and proposed that a petition should be addressed to the Duke on the subject. But here Schiller, in general the most acquiescent of men, gave a very decided negative. His honour would suffer frightfully, he said, if after his flight, which, with the reasons that prompted it, was known to all Germany, it should now be said of him that he had turned back after having once dared Fortune. He had chosen his own course, and would stand the hazard of the die. He would not consent to appear, like Shakespeare's Bolingbroke

"Sick in the world's regard, wretched and low, A poor unminded outlaw sneaking home." He would either return, some day, to Würtemberg, as a man who had made his way by his own strength, or he would never see his native state again. And the sturdy old father, while he lamented the enforced separation, in his secret soul admired his son all the more for the young man's readiness to accept the fortune he had chosen.

THE THIRD TRAGEDY, “KABALE UND LIEBE,"

The third of Schiller's tragedies, Kabale und Liebe, was entirely different in style from its predecessors. "I tell nobody that I possess a copy of thy new tragedy," wrote Captain Schiller, with a kind of suppressed exultation. "I dare not, on account of certain passages, let any one know that it has pleased me." We can well understand what these "certain passages" were. Schiller, in his outspoken hatred of wrong, had denounced the wicked misgovernment and tyranny of the despotic princes of his own time, their practice of selling "teams of men" for the service of foreign states in Armenia and elsewhere. "You may extend your traffic," the great Lord Chatham had cried indignantly, a few years before, to the House of Lords, in reference to the Hessian troops employed in the American war.

Isa may extend your traffic to the shambles of every German despot." The manly denunciaton of these vile practices helped to procure a great access for the piece, which was even acted in Stuart; and if Captain Schiller did not go, mosgate, to see it played, we may be sure it was not for want of inclination. Schiller had er doubted that he should leave his mark on the iterature of Germany, but now his success with the public was assured; and with the steady det perseverance that forms one of the trast attributes of genius, he sat down to struggle r his debts and embarrassments, to create 1-sef a position of modest independence,

to found a home of the plainest kind. Never va man more moderate in his desires, or more pssed with the fact that "man wants but there below." For a long time, his ideas dftaancial success were bounded by the hope of making six or seven hundred florins, sixty or erenty pounds, a year; nor did he ever in later

o show any care for money beyond the Latural and praiseworthy care to see his wife and children secured from the struggle he had Leif gone through. He was plain, unaffected,

minently "sensible" in manners, dress, and pech, "contemning all things mean, his truth 13quest.oned, and his soul serene." Never was man more entirely free from affectation or alonsciousness. With Leigh Hunt's Abou ben As also, he might have said, "Write me as me that loved his fellow-men." Depth of feelgrandeur of expression, vast range of thought, pear in every page of the works that have made La name immortal; and while of the worldly rado requisite to pecuniary success, and high scal advancement he was entirely destitute, he

In the other hand, free from that looseness A principle that has wrecked many a career, by Ling to genius an immunity from the orditary duties and responsibilities of life. To be wat be called an honest man," to pay his way, be free from the grinding anxieties and pitasdf delt, was the object for which he strove

edly for years; and the wise simplicity tragality of his arrangements, when he had

bod of his own, left his mind clear, once if all, from such sordid cares and anxieties at have darkened the lives of many men of genius, sal Lat curried Goldsmith, for example, to an tizels grave.

X05% TO WEIMAR- DON CARLOS" BEGUN
AND COMPLETED.

In 1784, Schiller undertook the editorship of a rary periodical, The Rhenish Thalia, devoted

chiefly to dramatic criticism. At this period he removed for a time to Leipsic, where he made the acquaintance of various useful and sympa. thetic friends, foremost among them being Körner, the father of the poet, whose war songs were destined, in 1813, to exert so great an influence in rousing Germany to resistance against Napoleon. In a quiet little cottage, in the village of Gohlis, a mile or two from Leipsic, Schiller worked diligently at a new drama, which he had undertaken, after considering and rejecting various subjects, such as a second part to The Robbers, a tragedy on Conradin of Swabia, and a translation of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. The subject on which he at last decided was a tragedy on the fate of Don Carlos, the unhappy son of Philip II. of Spain. In the autumn of the same year he removed to Dresden! One of the most important events of his life was his introduction to the Duke of Weimar, Carl August, whose interest in the poet was strongly aroused by hearing Schiller read the first act of Don Carlos at the Court of Darmstadt. A long conversation with Schiller, which confirmed his good opinion, led him to bestow on the poet the title of "Hofrath," or Court Counsellor. This gave him what the Germans would call "a new standpoint" with society in general, and the Duke of Würtemberg in particular. He was fulfilling the promise he had made, to carve out a fortune for himself. In 1787 another step was taken, in his removal to Weimar, at that time the Athens of Germany. By this time he had made the acquaintance of the Von Lengefeld family, old friends of his former schoolfellow, Wilhelm von Wolzogen; to one of two sisters, Charlotte von Lengefeld, he became a suitor, and married her on the 20th of February, 1790; for by this time another event had occurred, which filled the heart of old Captain-we beg his pardon, now Major Schiller-with joy and pride. His famous son had been appointed to a professorship of modern history at the University of Jena. Thus what the old man had long and ardently desired for his son, a fixed and honourable position, was definitely won; and soon afterwards came the marriage of the poet to Charlotte von Lengefeld, who proved the best of wives, and thoroughly valued and appreciated her poet husband. Not least among the evidences of Schiller's genuine nature is the affectionate attachment he continued to show towards his parents so long as they lived, and towards his sisters to the last day of his life

MERITS AND FAULTS OF "DON CARLOS." The publication and representation of Don Carlos was the chief literary event during this period. Here the poet handles his favourite subject, the championship of liberty against tyranny and oppression. The fault in the play is perhaps its undue elaboration; and Schiller himself acknowledged that in the course of the action the attention and sympathy of the audience is too much diverted from the hero, the unfortunate Carlos, to the champion of liberty and toleration, the heroic Marquis Posa. The character of Philip II., the gloomy suspicious tyrant, himself a slave to superstition, is powerfully drawn. We see him in his miserable lonely supremacy, far removed from human sympathy, seeking to crush all freedom of action, with the inquisition and the military cruelty of Alva for his agents. He distrusts his son, the unfortunate Carlos, whom he suspects of designs upon his crown and his life. Won for a moment to better thoughts by the pleading of the heroic Posa, who conjures him to crown the edifice of his power by granting freedom of thought throughout his dominions, and binding his subjects to him by ties of gratitude and affection, he relapses into dark suspicion, and sacrifices the son who loves him, and the wise counsellor who would have led him to better things. The piece is full of lofty thoughts and heroic sentiments, and like the majority of Schiller's works, is an eloquent vindication of right and justice against oppression and wrong. The point that strikes the reader as a fault is the fact that Marquis l'osa's philosophy belongs rather to the eighteenth than to the sixteenth century. His plea for "Gedanken-freiheit," freedom of thought, especially in religious matters, would have conveyed no definite idea in Spain, except perhaps that the inquisition should lose no time in laying hands on the heretic who dared to propose such a measure.

Another drawback, which indeed attaches to several of Schiller's heroic characters, is that to some extent he, like Cumberland, “paints men as they ought to be, not as they are." His great men are in general abstractions, portraitures of lofty and noble qualities; but they lack that infusion of the dross of human nature, those occasional moments of doubt and weakness which would render them real. Schiller, for instance, could have admirably painted Henry V. encouraging his men with burning words of eloquence on the morning of Agincourt; but he had not the versatility that pourtrayed the heroic king with a touch of the "Harry Madcap" of old days still lingering about him, good

humouredly bantering bragging Pistol, as 'Harry Le Roy, and exchanging challenge-gloves with the bluff soldier, who promises to "take him a box o' the ear." Carlyle, after pointing out some of the imperfections of the work, of which, it may be observed, the author himself was fully conscious, says: "Yet with all this, Carlos is a noble tragedy. There is a stately massiveness about the structure of it; the incidents are grand and affecting; the characters powerful, vividly conceived, and impressively, if not completely, delineated." The success of Carlos, alike among readers and spectators, far exceeded Schiller's expectations; and with him success was never an excuse for idleness, or even rest; but ever an incentive to new exertion. "Still achieving, still pursuing," was his motto; and he had shown, in full measure, that he had learned "to labour and to wait." No man more earnestly devoted himself to his work. In Weimar he even incurred the imputation of being unsociable, from his reluctance to quit his desk for the pleasures of society. Thus, in one of his letters, he writes: "I am complained of here, because they say I shall injure my health by hard work and by sitting at home. But that's how people are! They can't forgive one for being able to do without them. And how dearly they sell the little pleasure they are able to impart! If the most complete indifference concerning clubs and circles and coffee-parties constitute a misan. thrope, I have certainly become one in Rudolstadt."

SCHILLER'S ILLNESS; PRACTICAL SYMPATHY OF UNKNOWN FRIENDS.

The public remonstrance against overwork was not, in his case, without reason. His constitution had never been strong; and in 1791, Schiller was seized with an illness that threatened to put a stop at once to his literary activity and his life. It was an affection of the chest, accompanied by violent spasms; and for a time he was in great danger. His fortitude never left him. "We must submit to the all-governing Providence," he whispered to his weeping wife, and work so long as we have strength. Es wäre, doch schön," he said with a beaming smile to his Charlotte, when hope of his recovery awoke. "It would be beautiful after all, if we might remain longer together." He recovered suthi. ciently to return to his work, and to enrich the world for some years longer with the outpourings of a genius that grew brighter as its bodily tenement became more frail; but he was never again in perfect health; and his subsequent

works were written in intervals of bodily weakDw and pain, that would have crushed a less termined spirit. "We must work while we ve strength," he had said; and it was the strength of the mounting spirit, and of the parised will, that fought against the physical miness to the last.

Some amount of rest, however, was imperatrdy necessary; and this rest would be of little gra, unless the poet's mind could be kept free from anxiety for the future; for he was now a and and a father; and great as was his fame, he had literally still to work for his living. Just at that moment came help in the most acceptable form, and all the sweeter for the xt, inasmuch as it showed how he was appreated beyond the bounds of Germany. The Duke of Holstein-Augustenburg (the grandfather of the Prince Christian, Queen Victoria's

-law), and his friend Count von Schimreirann, wrote to Schiller, from Denmark, a ter fl of warm admiration and delicate rapathy, begging him to accept a pension of a thousand dollars for three years. "We wish to Prve for the human race one of its teachers,"

te the friends; and as though conscious that can offer from strangers might hurt the abilities of the poet, they earnestly depreate any imputation of undue interference in his "Your health," they say, "shattered by persistent effort and overwork, requires come rest for a time, if it is to be restored, and the danger which threatens your life averted.

t your circumstances prevent you from allow. pourself this rest. Will you allow us the tess to make this enjoyment easier to you?" ....The poet accepted the offer with a simple and honest expression of thanks. The Duke e back, thanking Schiller for having underad the offer and its motives. "Your conduct a this affair is quite worthy of you," he writes, and increases the esteem I already entertained Ar Schiller intended to accept the urgent atation of the Duke to visit him in Copen

; but his health was never strong enough aw him to undertake a northern journey.

A VISIT TO WURTEMBERG.

His parents were rejoiced at this piece of Fortune; and Schiller, in the next year, was able to journey to Würtemberg once more, and irst at Heilbronn, and afterwards in Ludburg and at Solitude, he visited the proud father and mother, who could not rejoice atly in his fame. The Grand Duke, to whom he had written, had not the grace to reply

to the former pupil who had quitted his service without leave; but declared publicly that if Schiller came to Stuttgart, he would "ignoriren" or take no notice of him. Duke Carl died in the next year. He is chiefly now remembered as having probably been instrumental, by his opposition, in making Schiller earlier and more completely known in Germany, than if he had never interfered with his literary career.

"There he rests, this man who was once so active," said Schiller, soon after, to a friend, at Duke Carl's tomb. "He had great faults as a ruler, greater faults as a man; but the former were outweighed by his great qualities, and the remembrance of the latter must be buried with the dead. Therefore, I tell thee, if you hear any one talking against him, now he is lying there, trust not that man; he is not a good, certainly not a noble-minded, man." The poet also stedfastly refused to write a congratulatory ode to Duke Carl's successor, on his accession, lest it might seem to convey a reproach on the dead master who had after all, in his way, been kind to him.

Very remarkable was a prophecy he made at that time concerning the newly constructed French republic. "It will end as suddenly as it has appeared," he said. "The republican constitution will degenerate into a condition of anarchy; and sooner or later a strong man of intellect will appear, let him come whence he may, who will make himself lord, not only of France, but perhaps of a great part of Europe." At this time Bonaparte, an unknown man, was serving as a colonel of artillery.

A great solace and assistance to Schiller in his literary career was the friendship of Goethe, with whom he became acquainted about this time. At first Goethe was prepossessed rather against than in favour of the younger poet, whose first works had appeared extravagant and unreal to the man of maturer years and taste. But two such men could not fail, when once brought together, to value and love each other; and a friendship sprang up between Goethe and Schiller, that was never interrupted till death severed it.

Not much longer was the proud old father to rejoice in the fame of his glorious son. On the 6th of September, 1796, his modest, useful life came to an end. He was seventy-two years old, and had worked almost to the last.

REVOLT OF THE NETHERLANDS; THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR.

Schiller's work in Jena naturally turned his