It has seemed worth while to linger a moment over these two rather unimportant productions for the sake of the light they throw on Schiller's general attitude. One sees that remote antiquity has lost in his eyes something of its old poetic glamour. He is content to explain it like any rationalizing professor. The past interests him mainly for the sake of the present, and of the present he now has a very good opinion,--especially of the Goddess of Reason. He did not know what a terrible trial was preparing for this goddess and her self-complacent worshippers. Ere long he himself was destined to lose a little of his buoyant faith in her and to become in part responsible for the apostasy of many. For the present, however, it was no inchoate Romanticism, but a publisher's enterprise, that led him into the study of the Middle Ages. He had undertaken to edit a great 'Collection of Historical Memoirs'. There were to be several volumes each year for an indefinite time; the volumes to consist of translations from various languages and to cover European history from the twelfth century down. Schiller was to supervise the undertaking and furnish the needful introductions. His plans were presently thwarted by illness and then by his increasing interest in philosophic studies; so that after the first few volumes had appeared he withdrew and left the continuation of the 'Memoirs' to other hands. Of his various contributions to the initial volumes of the 'Historical Memoirs' a part are mere hack-work and therefore devoid of biographical interest. Somewhat different is the case with an elaborate account of the crusades, in which he attempts to show that that great medieval madness,--so it was regarded by the Age of Enlightenment,--was 'in its origin too natural to excite our surprise and in its consequences too beneficent to convert our displeasure into a very different feeling'. The general argument is that the ancient civilizations were dominated by the idea of the state; they produced excellent Greeks and Romans but not excellent men. The prestige of the despotic states was destroyed by the great migrations, but it was the crusades which first taught the nations to subordinate patriotism to a higher and broader sentiment. It was then that men learned to fight for an idea of the reason,--for the truth as they saw it. And thus the crusades prepared the way for the Reformation. The interest of the essay lies not in the vigor of its logic, which is lame here and there, but in the evidence it affords of Schiller's increasing respect for the Middle Ages. And he went further still. In a preface which he wrote in 1792, for a German translation of Vertot's work on the Knights of Malta, we find a passage which sounds very much like Inchoate Romanticism: