The jealous cadet who plots criminally against his more fortunate brother is common to both Leisewitz and Klinger, but in neither is he an intriguing villain. In 'Julius of Tarentum' Guido is really the more masterful man of the two. He despises his brother as a weakling and asserts no other claim than that of the strongest. In Klinger's play, as we have seen, everything is made to turn upon Guido's cankering doubt of his brother's seniority. One gets the impression that if the doubt could be settled by indisputable evidence in favor of Ferdinando, there would be no _casus belli_; the younger son would bow to the law of primogeniture and that would end the matter. Schiller, however, felt the need of a bolder contrast to his hero. The 'sublime criminal' required a colossal foil; and as equality with the sword was out of the question, the most obvious recourse was to pit natural depravity against natural greatness; scheming intellect against hot blood. In working out his conception Schiller took counsel freely of Shakspere, whose name had now become for young Germany the symbol of all things great in dramatic writing. The first soliloquy of Franz Moor reminds one at once of Edmund in 'Lear', though there is none of the kind of borrowing which makes easy prey for the philologist. Both villains covet the wealth and station of a preferred brother; both make use of a specious obstetrical argument and both operate with forged letters. In general, however, the portrait of Franz was more influenced by Richard the Third than by Edmund, or Iago, or any of the other Shaksperian villains. Franz is the British Richard divested of his Shaksperian lordliness, transferred to a humbler sphere of action and provided with the mental outfit of an eighteenth-century _philosophe_, as seen by hostile critics. Both descant on their own deformity and confide to the public their villainous designs. But while Richard speaks in a tone of genial cynicism, as if his principal concern were only to bring a little variety into the tameness of "these fair, well-spoken days", the German villain solemnly turns himself inside out and regales us _ad nauseam_ with the metaphysics of iniquity. This is his mode of reasoning: