The teacher of Prince Carlos is the amazing Marquis of Posa. In a cynical foot-note of the year 1845 Carlyle quotes, with seeming approval, Richter's comparison of Posa to the tower of a light-house,--"high, far-shining, empty". But what would Jean Paul have had? Is it not quite enough for a light-house to be high and far-shining? One does not see how its usefulness would be enhanced by filling it with the beans and bacon of practical politics. Here surely one must side with Schiller and never think of criticising him for not making his Posa an exponent of political ideas that belong to a later time. Every age has its dream. Ours is of a people to be made happy by democratic legislation; Schiller's was of a people to be made happy by the personal goodness and enlightenment of the monarch. That the one dream, seen _sub specie aeternitatis_, is any more empty and fatuous than the other, would be very difficult to prove. The sentimental imagination of the eighteenth century was fond of dwelling upon the loneliness of the princely station. Standing above all other men, occupied habitually with weighty matters of state, surrounded by self-seeking flatterers and schemers, how was a ruler ever to hear the truth or to know the blessedness of disinterested friendship? Awful fate to be thus cut off from tender human affection and compelled to tread the wine-press alone! And if a prince should really find a friend, how fortunate for him and his subjects! It was the simple theory of idealists under the Old Régime that the happiness of a people depended altogether upon the wisdom and goodness of the king; and in an age when 'feeling was everything' it was natural that goodness of the heart should count for more than mere sagacity. What the king was believed to need pre-eminently, was to keep alive his human sympathies; and how could he do this better than by having some one to love and confide in? So Schiller provides his Spanish prince with a friend. Our drama seems to wish to impute to Posa a lovable personality; else how account for the spell that he casts over all three of the royal personages?[70] Looked at closely, however, and judged by his conduct rather than by his fine phrases, he appears anything but lovable. After his death it comes to light that he is deeply involved in a conspiracy for which the ordinary name is treason. He has been organizing a combination of European powers for the purpose of detaching the Netherlands by force from the Spanish crown. He returns to Spain as an arch-traitor,--with his pockets full of letters which if discovered would cost him his head. When one learns this and then thinks back in the light of this knowledge, his conduct throughout the play appears absolutely inconceivable; so that one is driven to the conjecture that Schiller did not think of him all along as an out-and-out traitor, but added this touch at the last, along with others, for the purpose of accenting his character as a Quixotic madman.