I could not say with certainty.  Goethe took down the Conversations Lexicon, and read the article on Byron, making many hasty remarks as he proceeded.  It appeared that Byron had published nothing before 1807, and that therefore Schiller could have seen nothing of his.

“Through all Schiller’s works,” continued Goethe, “goes the idea of freedom; though this idea assumed a new shape as Schiller advanced in his culture and became another man.  In his youth it was physical freedom which occupied him, and influenced his poems; in his later life it was ideal freedom.

“Freedom is an odd thing, and every man has enough of it, if he can only satisfy himself.  What avails a superfluity of freedom which we cannot use?  Look at this chamber and the next, in which, through the open door, you see my bed.  Neither of them is large; and they are rendered still narrower by necessary furniture, books, manuscripts, and works of art; but they are enough for me.  I have lived in them all the winter, scarcely entering my front rooms.  What have I done with my spacious house, and the liberty of going from one room to another, when I have not found it requisite to make use of them?

“If a man has freedom enough to live healthy, and work at his craft, he has enough; and so much all can easily obtain.  Then all of us are only free under certain conditions, which we must fulfil.  The citizen is as free as the nobleman, when he restrains himself within the limits which God appointed by placing him in that rank.  The nobleman is as free as the prince; for, if he will but observe a few ceremonies at court, he may feel himself his equal.  Freedom consists not in refusing to recognize anything above us, but in respecting something which is above us; for, by respecting it, we raise ourselves to it, and by our very acknowledgment make manifest that we bear within ourselves what is higher, and are worthy to be on a level with it.

“I have, on my journeys, often met merchants from the north of Germany, who fancied they were my equals, if they rudely seated themselves next me at table.  They were, by this method, nothing of the kind; but they would have been so if they had known how to value and treat me.

“That this physical freedom gave Schiller so much trouble in his youthful years, was caused partly by the nature of his mind, but still more by the restraint which he endured at the military school.  In later days, when he had enough physical freedom, he passed over to the ideal; and I would almost say that this idea killed him, since it led him to make demands on his physical nature which were too much for his strength.