save it from further outrage, waiting for and finding his own death there;—­and how this ruinous contest between Switzerland and Austria was not finally closed till the time of Maximilian, in 1499, when first the right of private war was abolished in Germany;—­and how, through the various fortunes of the succeeding centuries, the character of the Swiss has remained for the most part the same as in the earlier time:—­these things one may read at large elsewhere; but we hasten to the conclusion.

The story of Tell has been the subject of several dramas.  Lemierre, a popular French dramatist of his day, (though J. J. Rousseau affects to call him a scribe whom the French Academy once crowned,) produced a play founded upon it, in Paris, in 1766; but the language of Swiss freemen on a French stage was little to the taste of those days, and it was a failure.  Voltaire, when asked what he thought of it, replied,—­“Il n’y a rien a dire; il est ecrit en langue du pays.” But twenty years afterwards it was revived with prodigious success; for the truth which was in it flashed out then, forerunner of the storm which was soon to break over France.  Again, when Florian, whom we are to remember always for his “Fables,” banished in 1793 by the decree which forbade nobles to remain in Paris, taking refuge at Sceaux, was arrested and thrown into prison, he consoled his captivity by composing his drama of “Guillaume Tell,”—­the worst of his productions, it is recorded.  Lastly, it has been consecrated for all time by the genius of Friedrich Schiller.  The legend was first brought to Schiller’s notice, doubtless, by Goethe, who writes to him concerning it from Switzerland in 1797.  Goethe himself thought of founding an epic on it.  It was not, however, till 1801, before his journey to Dresden, that Schiller’s attention was permanently directed to it.  Completed on the 18th of February, it was brought out at Weimar on the 17th of March, 1804, with the most extraordinary success:  the fifth act, however, was suppressed, in deference to the intended court alliance with the daughter of a murdered Russian emperor; it not being considered good taste to represent the assassination of an autocrat upon such an occasion.

Schiller’s drama has been translated into French by Merle d’Aubigne and others, and many times into English,—­among us by the Rev. C. T. Brooks.  It follows the tradition substantially.  Carlyle declares, indeed, that “the incidents of the Swiss Revolution, as detailed in Tschudi or Mueller, are here faithfully preserved, even to their minutest branches.”  We tarried once for several days at Brunnen, and read the play upon the spot in sight of the Ruetli, in the little balcony of the pension of the Golden Eagle, with the deep, calm, blue lake at our feet, and the Hacken and Axen mountains and the Selisberg shutting out the world for a time; and as we look at the play now, it recalls with the utmost minuteness the scenery and the coloring of it all:  yet Schiller never was there.  It was the last startling effulgence of his comet-like genius; for when the spring-flowers came again, he was gone from our earth.