would be very helpful to him as a dramatic poet.  Whether he was right in so thinking is a question too large to be discussed here, nor can we follow him in the details of his esthetic speculation.  The subject is too abstruse to be dispatched in a few words.  Suffice it to say that a number of minor papers, the most important being On Winsomeness and Dignity (Ueber Anmut and Wuerde) and On the Sublime, prepared the way for a more popular exposition of his views in the Letters on Esthetic Education and in the memorable essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, which deserves to be called, next to Lessing’s Laocoon, the weightiest critical essay of the eighteenth century.  The Letters contain a ripe and pleasing statement of Schiller’s philosophy in its relation to the culture-problems of his epoch.

Along with these philosophic studies Schiller found time for much work more closely related to his professorship of history.  To say nothing of his minor historical writings, he completed, in 1793, his History of the Thirty Years’ War.  It appeared in successive numbers of Goeschen’s Ladies’ Calendar, a fact which in itself indicates that it was not conceived and should not be judged as a monument of research.  The aim was to tell the story of the great war in a readable style.  And in this Schiller succeeded, especially in the parts relating to his hero, the Swedish king Gustav Adolf.  Over Schiller’s merit as a historian there has been much debate, and good critics have caviled at his sharp contrasts and his lack of care in matters of detail.  But the great fact remains that the Defection of the Netherlands and the Thirty Years’ War are the earliest historical classics in the German language.  Schiller was the first German to make literature out of history.

The year 1794 brought about a closer relation between Schiller and Goethe, an event of prime moment in the lives of both.  On Goethe’s return from Italy, in the summer of 1788, Schiller was introduced to him, but the meeting had no immediate consequences.  In fact, Schiller had quietly made up his mind not to like the man whom, for a whole year, he had heard constantly lauded by the Weimar circle.  He thought of Goethe as a proud, self-centred son of fortune, with whom friendship would be impossible.  Goethe, on the other hand, was not drawn to the author of The Robbers.  He looked on the popularity of the detestable play as a shocking evidence of depraved public taste and was not aware how its author had changed since writing it.  So it came about that, for some six years, the two men lived as neighbors in space but strangers in the spirit.  At last, however, an accidental meeting in Jena led to an interchange of views and prepared the way for the most memorable of literary friendships.