Soon afterwards young Schiller came upon the scene with his first works, which were a declaration of war against all the foundations of human society, those manifestoes of revolution which, were they new writings to-day, no Court Theatre would dare to produce. The fierce, rampant lion, with the inscription "In Tyrannos," which was displayed on the title-page of the second edition of the _Robbers_, was an intimate symbol of the deep revolutionary spirit that inspired the whole age. "I grew disgusted with this ink-stained age, when I read in my _Plutarch_ of great men. Fie, fie upon the flaccid, castrated century, that has no other use than to chew over again the deeds of the past. Let me imagine an army of fellows like you, and I see a republic arising in Germany, in comparison with which those of Rome and Sparta would be convents of nuns." In a loud voice _Ficsco_ proclaims itself on the very title-page to be a "republican" tragedy. _Intrigue and Love_ even aims full at the rottenness and corruption of the actual time. It can be traced--and Brandes has done it in his _Haupströmungen_--how in the literature of the age, the life of sensibility and idealism prevailing in the previous century gradually dwindles, and in its stead quite modern progressive views--religious, political, and social--surge up in an ever-increasing wave. The authors were the bold inciters to the battle. They were all leaders in the battle for liberty against fossilised tradition,--some in the field of poetry only, others in the whole sphere of intellectual life. These are they who gave the signal for the war-cry of the Revolution--Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; who rent asunder the old society, inaugurated the age of citizenship, and were at the same time the first to lose, as quite modern spirits, their faith in another world. [Illustration: GOYA. THE MAJAS ON THE BALCONY.] A wonderful chance ordained that, in the province of art, the most powerful figure of that storm and tumult, the one artist of the age of the race of Prometheus, to which belonged the young Goethe and the young Schiller, should be born in the most mediæval country in Europe, on Spanish soil. Against an art that was more catholic than catholicism, courtly and mystical, there came by far the greatest reaction in Goya. From Roelas, Collantes, and Murillo to him there is hardly any transition.