Even now the necessity of seeking his fortune somewhere was daily becoming more imperious. The _Thalia_ did not pay, though the critics spoke well of it, and he could not live forever upon Körner's friendly advances of money. The sense of his dependence often galled him; and yet when a proposal, in itself highly attractive, came to him from a distant city, he could not pluck up courage to leave his friend. Friedrich Schröder, the greatest German actor of the time, wished to draw him to Hamburg. Schiller looked up to Schröder with genuine admiration and speculatively promised himself great gain from association with 'the one man in Germany who could realize all his ideas of art.' In Mannheim,--so he wrote in October, 1786,--he had lost all his enthusiasm for the theater; it was now beginning to revive, but he shuddered at the treatment to which playwrights were exposed by theatrical people. Moreover he was living at Dresden 'in the bosom of a family to which he had become necessary'. So nothing came of the negotiations except the preparation of a stage version of 'Don Carlos' for the Hamburg theater. An amusing glimpse of domestic conditions in the Körner household is afforded by Schiller's dramatic skit, entitled 'Körner's Forenoon'. It belongs apparently to the year 1787, but was not published until 1862. The busy councillor of the Dresden Consistory sees a little leisure before him and squares off at his desk for a solid forenoon's work. He begins by ordering his man to shave him. Then he is interrupted by a procession of callers,--Schiller, in various rôles, and Minna, and Dorchen, and Professor Becker and others--who keep the stream of babble flowing until one o'clock. Körner is too late for the consistory and all that he has accomplished is to get shaved. The piece is a slight affair, but there is enough of solemn fun in it to make one wish that its author had seen fit to work his lighter vein more frequently.