conflict, he abandoned his parents and the friends of his youth, and in October of the same year made his escape from an intolerable servitude. It has been gravely stated, to the credit of the duke, that he suffered his disobedient subject, some ten years afterwards, when he had acquired celebrity, to visit his family unmolested. That is, he was not seized and shot as a deserter. When Schiller thus threw himself on the world, he had no other friends than those whom these early fruits of his talents had raised, no other support than the consciousness of those talents, nor other immediate resource than the unwrought materials of two other tragedies in prose, which he produced almost immediately, and which established his character as a dramatic poet. These were the Conspiracy of Fiesco, a political play taken from the romantic tale of St. Real, in which the intrigues of republican faction were picturesquely exhibited, and Cabal and Love, in which the tragic distress arises from the conflict between the natural passion of love, and the conventional social duties which originate in the relations of birth and station. During the completion of these juvenile works, which appeared in 1783 and 1784, his first asylum was Manheim, where he even deliberated about becoming an actor; and his first patron was the munificent ecclesiastic Baron von Dalberg, who became at a future period, under the French government, Prince-primate of Catholic Germany. Schiller also became the editor of the Rhenish Mercury, a monthly miscellany devoted to literature and the arts, and engaged in manifold literary labours, for which he had to qualify himself by supplying the defects of a very imperfect education. He early felt the necessity of studying history as indispensable to the cultivation of the serious drama, and so he became an historian by profession. At that time, it was a fashionable opinion that all sciences and arts were to be founded on metaphysics, and he became also a metaphysician. But in order to pursue these studies, it was not on the north-western frontier of Germany that he could profitably remain.