to scourge the Spanish inquisition.  Little by little, however, the centre of his interest shifted from the lovesick Carlos to the quixotic dreamer Posa, and the result was that the love-tragedy gradually grew into a tragedy of political idealism with Posa for its hero.  As finally completed in the summer of 1787, Don Carlos had twice the length of an ordinary stage-play and, withal, a certain lack of artistic unity.  But its sonorous verse, its fine phrasing of large ideas, and its noble dignity of style settled forever the question of Schiller’s power as a dramatic poet.  The third act especially is instinct with the best idealism of the eighteenth century.

After Don Carlos Schiller wrote no more plays for some nine years, being occupied in the interval chiefly with history and philosophy.  His dramatic work had interested him more especially in the sixteenth century.  At Dresden he began to read history with great avidity and found it very appetizing.  What he most cared for, evidently, was not the annals of warfare or the growth of institutions, but the psychology of the great man.  He was an ardent lover of freedom, both political and intellectual, and took keen delight in tracing its progress.  On the other hand, play-writing had its disadvantages.  Thus far it had brought him more of notoriety than of solid fame, and his income was so small that he was dependent on Koerner’s generosity.  To escape from this irksome position he decided to try his fortune in Thuringia.  Going over to Weimar, in the summer of 1787, he was well received by Herder and Wieland—­Goethe was just then in Italy—­and presently he settled down to write a history of the Dutch Rebellion.  His plan looked forward to six volumes, but only one was ever written.  It was published in 1788 under the title of The Defection of the Netherlands and led to its author’s appointment as unsalaried professor of history at the University of Jena.  He began to lecture in the spring of 1789.

Meanwhile he had taken up the study of the Greek poets and found them very edifying and sanative—­just the influence that he needed to clarify his judgment and correct his earlier vagaries of taste.  He was fascinated by the Odyssey and in a mood of fleeting enthusiasm he resolved to read nothing but the ancients for the next two years.  He translated the Iphigenia in Aulis of Euripides and a part of The Phenician Women.  Out of this newborn ardor grew two important poems, The Gods of Greece and The Artists; the former an elegy on the decay of Greek polytheism conceived as a loss of beauty to the world, the latter a philosophic retrospect of human history wherein the evolutionary function of art is glorified.  At the same time he revived the dormant Thalia and used its columns for the continued publication of The Ghost-seer, a pot-boiling novel which he had begun at Dresden.  It is Schiller’s one serious attempt at prose fiction.  His initial purpose was to describe an elaborate and fine-spun intrigue, devised by mysterious agents of the Church of Rome, for the winning over of a Protestant German prince.  The story begins in a promising way, and the later portions contain fine passages of narrative and character-drawing.  But its author presently began to feel that it was unworthy of him and left it unfinished.