Friedrich Schiller, the greatest of German dramatic poets, was born November 10, 1759, at Marbach in Swabia.  His father was an officer in the army which the Duke of Wuerttemberg sent out to fight the Prussians in the Seven Years’ War.  Of his mother, whose maiden name was Dorothea Kodweis, not much is known.  She was a devout woman who lived in the cares and duties of a household that sometimes felt the pinch of poverty.  After the war the family lived a while at the village of Lorch, where Captain Schiller was employed as recruiting officer.  From there they moved, in 1766, to Ludwigsburg, where the extravagant duke Karl Eugen had taken up his residence and was bent on creating a sort of Swabian Versailles.  Here little Fritz went to school and was sometimes taken to the gorgeous ducal opera, where he got his first notions of scenic illusion.  The hope of his boyhood was to become a preacher, but this pious aspiration was brought to naught by the offer of free tuition in an academy which the duke had started at his Castle Solitude near Stuttgart.

This academy was Schiller’s world from his fourteenth to his twenty-first year.  It was an educational experiment conceived in a rather liberal spirit as a training-school for public service.  At first the duke had the boys taught under his own eye at Castle Solitude, where they were subjected to a strict military discipline.  There being no provision for the study of divinity, Schiller was put into law, with the result that he floundered badly for two years.  In 1775 the institution was augmented by a faculty of medicine and transferred to Stuttgart, where it was destined to a short-lived career under the name of the Karlschule.  Schiller gladly availed himself of the permission to change from law to medicine, which he thought would be more in harmony with his temperament and literary ambitions.  And so it proved.  As a student of medicine he made himself at home in the doctrines and practices of the day, and for several years after he left school he thought now and then of returning to the profession of medicine.

For posterity the salient fact of his long connection with the Karlschule is that he was there converted into a fiery radical and a banner-bearer of the literary revolution.  Just how it came about is hard to explain in detail.  The school was designed to produce docile and contented members of the social order; in him it bred up a savage and relentless critic of that order.  The result may be ascribed partly, no doubt, to the natural reaction of an ardent, liberty-loving temperament against a system of rigid discipline and petty espionage.  The eleves—­French was the official language of the school—­were not supposed to read dangerous books, and their rooms were often searched for contraband literature.  But they easily found ways to evade the rule and enjoy the savor of forbidden fruit.

[Illustration:  Friedrich von Schiller]