that Schiller was brought up in a country, the people of which possessed no political power, nor any civil liberty but under sufferance; and that during the more important period of his life, his country suffered under the aggravated oppression of a foreign yoke. No English reader can form a correct judgment of any German political work of the last age, be it of thought or imagination, who for an instant forgets either of these two facts; and in the study of the works of Goethe and Schiller, it is especially necessary to keep them always before us. It must otherwise appear unaccountable, that since the youth of Schiller had been passed in the suffering incident to oppressed poverty; since he had the consciousness of not occupying that station in society to which his natural superiority over others entitled him; since he had the constitutional ardour of a man of genius, and was, by his position in society, led to feel, as a reformer, not to say agitator, on every polemical question that could arise between the people and the privileged orders; there should, notwithstanding all this, be so little that is stimulating and practical in his writings. But the wonder ceases, when it is borne in mind, that while in Britain the French Revolution was an object of hope or fear, and was held up as party feelings prompted, either as a warning or an example, in Germany it was seldom more than a problem for the exercise of the talents of speculative men: and whatever susceptibility to insurrectional excitements there might be among any class of the people, was repressed, not merely by the utter extinction of all liberty in France, but by all the humiliations and oppressions endured in every part of Germany from an imperious conquering enemy. Hence, while the German people went far beyond the British in the intensity of their hatred towards France, the privileged order of thinkers among them, from their habits of abstract speculation, were able to contemplate the events of the day, as well as the principles set afloat, with an unsympathising coolness unknown either in England or France. Hence, even in Schiller, whose earliest writings betrayed tendencies from which it might be feared that a German Jacobin would be formed, the love of liberty soon subsided from a passion into a taste. It became a quiet, moral sentiment, like the love of religion, of virtue, of country: he never could indeed lay aside his essentially moral and sentimental nature; nor during the period of his country’s abasement, which to the irretrievable loss of the nation he did not survive, could he, like Goethe, devoting himself to the studies of pure art and science, dismiss by an effort from his mind the consideration of the painful incidents of the day. On the contrary, they entirely filled his soul; they formed the background of all his speculations and feelings, in his dramas, histories, disquisitions, and poems. A sentiment which for years pressed on him, and which