In 1780, the same year in which he passed his examination and received the appointment of regimental surgeon, Schiller wrote his first tragedy, “The Robbers.” His taste for dramatic poetry had been roused partly by Goethe’s “Goetz von Berlichingen” and Shakespeare’s plays, partly by his visits to the theatre, which, under the patronage of the Duke, was then in a very flourishing state. The choice of the subject of his first dramatic composition was influenced by the circumstances of his youth. His poetical sympathy for a character such as Karl Moor, a man who sets at defiance all the laws of God and man, can only be accounted for by the revulsion of feeling produced on his boyish mind by the strict military discipline to which all the pupils at the Academy were subjected. His sense of right and wrong was strong enough to make him paint his hero as a monster, and to make him inflict on him the punishment he merited. But the young poet could not resist the temptation of throwing a brighter light on the redeeming points in the character of a robber and murderer by pointedly placing him in contrast with the even darker shades of 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 _protégé_; 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