That Franz Grillparzer was destined to no happy childhood is obvious, and it is equally clear that he needed a strong will to overcome not merely material obstacles to progress but also inherited dispositions of such antithetical sort.  The father and the mother were at war in his breast.  Like the mother in sensitiveness and imaginativeness, he was the son of his father in a stern censoriousness that was quick to ridicule what appeared to be nonsense in others and in himself; but he was the son of his father also in clearness of understanding and devotion to duty as he saw it.

Grillparzer once said that his works were detached fragments of his life; and though many of their themes seem remote from him in time and place, character and incident in them are unmistakably enriched by being often conceived in the light of personal experience.  Outwardly, however, his life was comparatively uneventful.  After irregular studies with private tutors and at school, Grillparzer studied law from 1807 to 1811 at the University of Vienna, gave instruction from 1810 to 1813 to the sons of various noblemen, and in 1813 began in the Austrian civil service the humdrum career which, full of disappointments and undeserved setbacks, culminated in his appointment in 1832 to the directorship of the Hofkammerarchiv, and lasted until his honorable retirement in 1856.  He was a conscientious official; but throughout this time he was regarded, and regarded himself, primarily as Grillparzer the poet; and in spite of loyalty to the monarchy, he was entirely out of sympathy with the antediluvian administration of Metternich and his successors.  Little things, magnified by pusillanimous apprehension, stood in his way.  In 1819 he expressed in a poem The Ruins of Campo Vaccino esthetic abhorrence of the cross most inappropriately placed over the portal of the Coliseum in Rome, and was thereafter never free of the suspicion of heresy.  In 1825 membership in a social club raided by the police subjected him to the absurd suspicion of plotting treason.  Only once do we find him, during the first half of the century, persona gratissima with the powers that be.  Grillparzer firmly disapproved the disintegrating tendencies of the revolution of 1848, and uttered his sense of the duty of loyal cooeperation under the Habsburgs in a spirited poem, To Field-Marshal Count Radetzky.  For the moment he became a national hero, especially in the army.  His latter years were indeed years of honor; but the honor came too late.  He was given the cross of the order of Leopold in 1849, was made Hofrat and a member of the House of Lords in 1856, and received the grand cross of the order of Franz Josef upon the celebration of his eightieth birthday in 1871.  He died on the twenty-first of January, 1872.