We remember him once settling an elaborate discussion carried on in his presence, upon the respective sublimity of Shakespeare and Schiller in Othello and the Robbers, by saying, "Both are sublime; only Schiller's is the material sublime that's all!"

Schiller had meanwhile become a surgeon in the Würtemberg army; and the Duke, scandalised at the moral errors of the "Robbers," and not less at its want of literary merit, forbade him to write more poetry.

Schiller is the favourite poet among them and Augustus Lafontaine the favourite novel writer.

To mention only a few examples of men who would scarcely be thought of in a professorial career,Schiller was Professor of History in Jena, Rückert Professor in Berlin, Uhland in Tübingen.

Schiller was a Swabian, and this poem seems a patriotic effusion to exalt one of the heroes of his country, of whose fame (to judge by the lines we have just quoted) the rest of the Germans might be less reverentially aware.

Having left his post of duty and being a military officer, Schiller was technically a deserter and had reason to fear pursuit and arrest.

Schiller was the first German to make literature out of history.

Schiller is his king of singers, although he does not much admire his "Philosophical Letters," or his "Aesthetic Letters."