It is natural to raise the query whether these considerations, which are so obvious and are of the very kind that would have appealed to Schiller, were overlooked by him or were set aside for reasons of his own. Virtually he takes the Catholic side of the controversy. The ugly traits of Mary's character, while we cannot say that they are concealed with partisan intent, are so wrought into the picture that they do not impress the imagination as ugly at all. They are consigned to the dim limbo of the past and have the effect of winning for her that sympathy which human nature is always ready to bestow, in art if not in life, upon the Magdalen type. On the other hand, the ignoble traits of Queen Elizabeth are brought into the foreground and made the most of, while her great qualities are hardly more than adumbrated in the picture. The result is a canonization and a caricature; and one cannot help wondering how Schiller was brought thereto, when it would seem that his Protestant sympathies, as we have known him hitherto, should have led him in the contrary direction. The key to the riddle is, no doubt, that he had begun to feel the influence of the Romantic movement, which was well under way when 'Mary Stuart' was written. The influence is difficult to prove, because Schiller always maintained ostensibly a very cool and critical attitude toward the efforts of the new school. His relations with its leaders were not intimate, and one of them at least, the younger Schlegel, was his particular aversion. Nevertheless he read their works; and while he always professed to be but little edified, there is abundant evidence that his ideas of literary art were considerably affected by the new propaganda. So, too, Goethe was never a partisan of the Romanticists, and he often spoke derisively of them; yet when he published the Second Part of 'Faust', the world saw that he had learned from them all there was to be learned. An author is not always most influenced by that which he consciously approves. As for Schiller there was much in common between him and the Romanticists. He had worked out an aesthetic religion which completely satisfied him. In religious dogma of any kind he had ceased to take a practical interest. His ethical ideal was an ideal of harmony, of equipoise. His critical studies had cured him of his one-sided Hellenism, and his historical studies had taught him that the Middle Ages were not without their own peculiar greatness. It was thus natural enough that the Catholicizing drift of the Romantic school should appeal to his aesthetic sympathies. When a man of poetic temper drifts away from his theological moorings and becomes indifferent to positive dogma, he is apt to value the historical religions according to their aesthetic qualities. That is best which has the most warmth and color and makes the strongest appeal to the imagination.