f
hypocritical respectability and saintliness in the picture of his brother
Franz. The language in which Schiller paints his characters is powerful,
but it is often wild and even coarse. The Duke did not approve of his
former _protege_; the very title-page of "The Robbers" was enough to
offend his Serene Highness,--it contained a rising lion, with the motto
"_In tyrannos_." The Duke gave a warning to the young military surgeon,
and when, soon after, he heard of his going secretly to Mannheim to be
present at the first performance of his play, he ordered him to be put
under military arrest. All these vexations Schiller endured, because he
knew full well there was no escape from the favors of his royal protector.
But when at last he was ordered never to publish again except on medical
subjects, and to submit all his poetical compositions to the Duke's
censorship, this proved too much for our young poet. His ambition had been
roused. He had sat at Mannheim a young man of twenty, unknown, amid an
audience of men and women who listened with rapturous applause to his own
thoughts and words. That evening at the theatre of Mannheim had been a
decisive evening,--it was an epoch in the history of his life; he had felt
his power and the calling of his genius; he had perceived, though in a dim
distance, the course he had to run and the laurels he had to gain. When he
saw that the humor of the Duke was not likely to improve, he fled from a
place where his wings were clipped and his voice silenced. Now, this
flight from one small German town to another may seem a matter of very
little consequence at present. But in Schiller's time it was a matter of
life and death. German sovereigns were accustomed to look upon their
subjects as their property. Without even the show of a trial the poet
Schubart had been condemned to life-long confinement by this same Duke
Charles. Schiller, in fleeing his benefactor's dominions, had not only
thrown away all his chances in life, but he had placed his safety and the
safety of his family in extreme danger. It was a bold, perhaps a reckless
step. But whatever we may think of it in a moral point of view, as
historians we must look upon it as the Hegira in the life of the poet.

Schiller was now a man of one or two and twenty, thrown upon the world
penniless, with nothing to depend on but his brains. The next ten years
were hard years for him; they were years of unsettledness, sometimes of
penury and despai