These qualities of the youthful Schiller's poetry foretell that he will never be a great lyrist, but they promise well enough for the poetic tale. This promise is seen notably in the poem called 'The Infanticide'. It is a gruesome thing, with the pathos here and there overstrained, but what a power of vivid narration! What a gift for the portraiture of frenzied passion! For the rest, it should not go unrecorded that certain poems of the 'Anthology' went altogether too far in the defiance of conventional morality. The study of medicine, combined with the ardor of youthful revolt and the seductions of a new bohemian life, had so sensualized the mind of Schiller that, for a brief period in his career, he found pleasure in exploiting the indecent. It was but a passing phase, and not very bad at its worst. Still, if Heine, and the other emancipators of the flesh who came later, had felt the need of supporting their cause by an appeal to distinguished authority, they might have referred quite unabashed to the youthful sins of the idealist Schiller. Little notice was taken of the 'Anthology' even in Suabia, and none at all, apparently, in the outside German world. The investment brought no immediate returns in fame or in money, and other experiments of a different character turned out but little better. As early as the spring of 1781 Schiller had assumed the editorial charge of a would-be popular magazine intended to contribute to the 'benefit and pleasure' of the Suabians. It was a weak provincial affair that soon died of inanition. The hack-work that Schiller did for it is of no biographical interest, save that it brought him into connection with Suabian writers and suggested to him that with a freer hand he might produce a better journal. In the following year, accordingly, we find him starting, in conjunction with his friends Abel and Petersen, the _Wirtemberg Repertory of Literature_. It was to be a quarterly, and bore the ominous legend: 'at the expense of the editors'. To this journal Schiller contributed various essays and reviews which show that as a critic he had been influenced by Lessing, but had not acquired the knack of Lessing's luminous and straightforward style. In a rather badly written paper on 'The Present Condition of the German Theater', he takes up a question which was destined to interest him later,--that of the relation of the drama to morality. He has no difficulty in showing that people are not deterred from the vices or impelled to the virtues that they see represented on the stage.