THE life and character of this most popular of German writers have been made familiar to the English and American Public by Mr. Carlyle's excellent biography, republished in this country several years since, and still the best, if not the only one, in the English language. It has the credit of having been translated into German at the solicitation of his late Excellency, von Goethe. To this everywhere accessible and everywhere satisfactory work the reader is referred for a fuller account of Schiller than is compatible with the scope of the present publication. For readers of German, there is Döring's well-known work, and later and better, Schiller's Leben, &c., by Frau von Wolzogen, sister-in-law of the poet.

A very brief notice must suffice for these pages. Schiller was a native of Marburg, in the duchy of Würtemberg. His father, Johann Caspar Schiller, a military officer in the service of the Duke, was piously solicitous to procure for his son the best education which his circumstances would allow. For this purpose he was first placed under the tuition of a private instructer, a clergyman by the name of Möser, and afterward sent to the Latin school at Ludwigsburg. It was the wish of his parentsand his own choice, as he ripened toward manhood, coincided with theirs—that he should become a divine; but the offer of the Duke and the preference shown to the sons of military officers at the new seminary established by him at Stuttgard, induced them to place him at that institution, where his studies assumed a different direction, and where, after devoting himself awhile to law, he finally settled upon medicine.

The six years spent at this institution are represented as the most wretched of his life. "The Stuttgart system of education," says his biographer, "seems to have been formed on the principle, not of cherishing and correcting nature, but of rooting it out and supplying its place with something better. The process of teaching and living was conducted with the stiff formality of military drilling. Everything

went on by statute and ordinance; there was no scope for the exercise of freewill, no allowance for the varieties of original structure. A scholar might possess what instincts or capacities he pleased, the 'regulations of the school' took no account of this; he must fit himself into the common mould which, like the old giant's bed, stood there appointed by superior authority to be filled alike by the great and the little. The same strict and narrow course of reading and composition was marked out for each beforehand, and it was by stealth if he read or wrote anything beside." "The pupils were kept apart from the conversation or sight of any person but their teachers; none ever got beyond the precincts of despotism to snatch even a fearful joy. Their very amusements proceeded by word of command."

* * * *

This sort of discipline was ill adapted to educate a poet. Some natures would have been utterly perverted or crushed by it. In Schiller it produced an intense inwardness. His soul was thrust back within itself, and found refuge in the world of ideas from the hard formalities of his scholastic life. This effect was both a benefit and an evil. It is impossible to say whether, on the whole, he gained or lost by it. On the one hand, it stimulated his productiveness and was probably the chief and immediate cause of his literary efforts; and on the other hand, it gave his poetry that subjective character, the excess of which is its great defect. Perhaps, a more genial nurture would have corrected this error by awakening an interest in actual life; and perhaps too, such a nurture might have given his faculties a different direction and left the poet undeveloped. It is doubtful if any training could have supplied that intimate communication with external nature, that eye for forms, that love of things, that sunny realism which constitutes so essential a qualification of the true poet, and which seems to be a natural endowment, unattainable and inimitable.

In 1780 Schiller, having completed his medical studies, was appointed surgeon to the (365)

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THE life and character of this most popular of German writers have been made familiar to the English and American Public by Mr. Carlyle's excellent biography, republished in this country several years since, and still the best, if not the only one, in the English language. It has the credit of having been translated into German at the solicitation of his late Excellency, von Goethe. To this everywhere accessible and everywhere satisfactory work the reader is referred for a fuller account of Schiller than is compatible with the scope of the present publication. For readers of German, there is Döring's well-known work, and later and better, Schiller's Leben, &c., by Frau von Wolzogen, sister-in-law of the poet.

A very brief notice must suffice for these pages. Schiller was a native of Marburg, in the duchy of Würtemberg. His father, Johann Caspar Schiller, a military officer in the service of the Duke, was piously solicitous to procure for his son the best education which his circumstances would allow. For this purpose he was first placed under the tuition of a private instructer, a clergyman by the name of Möser, and afterward sent to the Latin school at Ludwigsburg. It was the wish of his parents— and his own choice, as he ripened toward manhood, coincided with theirs that he should become a divine; but the offer of the Duke and the preference shown to the sons of military officers at the new seminary established by him at Stuttgard, induced them to place him at that institution, where his studies assumed a different direction, and where, after devoting himself awhile to law, he finally settled upon medicine.

The six years spent at this institution are represented as the most wretched of his life. "The Stuttgart system of education," says his biographer, "seems to have been formed on the principle, not of cherishing and correcting nature, but of rooting it out and supplying its place with something better. The process of teaching and living was conducted with the stiff formality of military drilling. Everything

went on by statute and ordinance; there was no scope for the exercise of freewill, no allowance for the varieties of original structure. A scholar might possess what instincts or capacities he pleased, the 'regulations of the school' took no account of this; he must fit himself into the common mould which, like the old giant's bed, stood there appointed by superior authority to be filled alike by the great and the little. The same strict and narrow course of reading and composition was marked out for each beforehand, and it was by stealth if he read or wrote anything beside." * "The pupils were kept apart from the conversation or sight of any person but their teachers; none ever got beyond the precincts of despotism to snatch even a fearful joy. Their very amusements proceeded by word of command."

* * *

This sort of discipline was ill adapted to educate a poet. Some natures would have been utterly perverted or crushed by it. In Schiller it produced an intense inwardness. His soul was thrust back within itself, and found refuge in the world of ideas from the hard

formalities of his scholastic life. This effect was both a benefit and an evil. It is impossible to say whether, on the whole, he gained or lost by it. On the one hand, it stimulated his productiveness and was probably the chief and immediate cause of his literary efforts; and on the other hand, it gave his poetry that subjective character, the excess of which is its great defect. Perhaps, a more genial nurture would have corrected this error by awakening an interest in actual life; and perhaps too, such a nurture might have given his faculties a different direction and left the poet undeveloped. It is doubtful if any training could have supplied that intimate communication with external nature, that eye for forms, that love of things, that sunny realism which constitutes so essential a qualification of the true poet, and which seems to be a natural endowment, unattainable and inimitable.

In 1780 Schiller, having completed his medical studies, was appointed surgeon to the