Frederick Schiller was born in 1759, at Marbach, a small town of Wurtemberg. In his mind seem to have been blended, and there strengthened, elevated, and refined, the qualities of his parents--the one, a man of clear upright mind; the other, a woman of more than common intelligence and taste, who both enjoyed the fortune of living to witness the greatness of their son. Schiller had the benefit of good early instruction. At the age of fourteen he was placed in a high school, just founded by the reigning Duke of Wurtemberg, and conducted with military discipline. Here, while his daily teachers were tasking him with irksome lessons, first of jurisprudence and afterwards of medicine, the chained genius, chafing like the lion in his cage, was brooding over the thoughts, and by stealth feeding with a translation of Shakspeare the cravings, which nature had implanted in him to produce one of her noblest works--a great poet. At eighteen he began, within the walls of the Duke's military school, _The Robbers_, often feigning sickness, that he might have a light in his room at night to transfer to paper his daring conception and burning thoughts. He postponed its publication until after he had finished his college course and had obtained the post of surgeon in the army, in his twenty-first year. The appearance of _The Robbers_, as a consequence of the formal drilling of the self-complacent pedagogues of the Duke of Wurtemberg, I have elsewhere[1] likened to the explosion of a mass of gunpowder under the noses of ignorant boys drying it before a fire to be used as common sand. Schiller himself, in after life, described it as "a monster, for which by good fortune the world has no original, and which I would not wish to be immortal, except to perpetuate an example of the offspring which genius, in its unnatural union with thraldom, may give to the world." Never did a literary work produce a stronger impression. With enthusiastic admiration, the world hailed in it the advent of a mighty poet. [Footnote 1: North American Review, for July 1834.]