number never was completed: and, Goethe being now busy with his Wil helm Meister, the project of completing it was at length renounced; and the Xenias were published as unconnected particles, not pretending to constitute a whole. Enough appeared to create unbounded commotion among the parties implicated: the Xenias were exclaimed against, abused and replied to on all hands: but as they had declared war not on persons but on actions; not against Gleim, Nicolai, Munso, but against bad taste, dulness, and affectation, nothing criminal could be sufficiently made out against them. The Musenalmanach, where they appeared in 1797, continued to be published till the time of Schiller's leaving Jena: the Horen ceased some months before.

The co-operation of Goethe, which Schiller had obtained so readily in these pursuits, was of singular use to him in many others. Both possessing minds of the first order, yet constructed and trained in the most opposite modes, each had much that was valuable to learn of the other, and suggest to him. Cultivating different kinds of excellence, they could joyfully admit each other's merit; connected by mutual services, and now by community of literary interests, few unkindly feelings could have place between them. For a man of high qualities, it is rare to find a meet companion; painful and injurious to want one. Solitude exasperates or deadens the heart; perverts or enervates the faculties: association with inferiors leads to dogmatism in thought, and self-will even in affections. Rousseau never should have lived in the Val de Montmorenci; it had been good for Warburton that Hurd had not existed; for Johnson never to have known Boswell or Davies. From such evils Schiller and Goethe were delivered: their intimacy seems to have been equal, frank, and cordial; from the contrasts and the endowments of their minds, it must have had peculiar charms. In his critical theories, Schiller had derived much profit from communicating with an intellect as excursive as his own, but far cooler and more sceptical: as he lopped off from his creed the excrescences of Kantism, Goethe and he, on comparing their ideas, often found in

them a striking similarity; more striking and more gratifying, when it was considered from what diverse premises these harmonious conclusions had been drawn. On such subjects they often corresponded when absent, and conversed when together. They were in the habit of paying long visits to each other's houses; frequently they used to travel in company between Jena and Weimar. "At Triesnitz, half a mile from Jena, Goethe and he," we are told, "might sometimes be observed sitting at table, beneath the shade of a spreading tree; talking and looking at the current of passengers."-There are some who would have "travelled fifty miles on foot" for the pleasure of joining the party.

Besides this intercourse with Goethe, he was happy in a kindly connexion with many other estimable men, both in literary and in active life. Dalberg, at a distance, was to the last his friend and warmest admirer. At Jena, he had Schütz, Paul, Hufland, Reinhold. Wilhelm von Humboldt, also, brother of the celebrated traveller, had come thither about this time, and was now among his closest associates. At Weimar, excluding less important persons, there were still Herder and Wieland to divide his attention with Goethe. And what to his affectionate heart must have been the most grateful circumstance of all, his aged parents were yet living to participate in the splendid fortune of the son whom they had once lamented and despaired of, but never ceased to love. In 1793, he paid them a visit in Swabia, and passed nine cheerful months among the scenes dearest to his recollection; enjoying the kindness of those unalterable friends whom nature had given him; and the admiring deference of those by whom it was most delightful to be honoured-those who had known him in adverse and humbler circumstances, whether they might have respected or contemned him. By the Grand Duke, his ancient censor and patron, he was not interfered with; that Prince, in answer to a previous application on the subject, having indirectly engaged to take no notice of this journey. The Grand Duke had already interfered too much with him, and bitterly repented of his in

terference. Next year he died; an event which Schiller, who had long forgotten past ill-treatment, did not learn without true sorrow, and grateful recollections of by-gone kindness. The new sovereign, anxious to repair the injustice of his predecessor, almost instantly made offer of a vacant Tübingen professorship to Schiller a proposal flattering to the latter, but which, by the persuasion of the Duke of Weimar, he respectfully declined.

Amid labours and amusements so multiplied, amid such variety of intellectual exertion and of intercourse with men, Schiller, it was clear, had not suffered the encroachments of bodily disease to undermine the vigour of his mental or moral powers. No period of his life displayed in stronger colours the lofty and determined zeal of his character. He had already written much; his fame stood upon a firm basis; domestic wants no longer called upon him for incessant effort; and his frame was pining under the slow canker of an incurable malady. Yet he never loitered, never rested; his fervid spirit, which had vanquished opposition and oppression in his youth; which had struggled against harassing uncertainties, and passed unsullied through many temptations, in his earlier manhood, did not now yield to this last and most fatal enemy. The present was the busiest, most productive season of his literary life; and with all its drawbacks, it was probably the happiest. Violent attacks from his disorder were of rare occurrence; and its constant influence, the dark vapours with which it would have overshadowed the faculties of his head and

heart, were repelled by diligence and a courageous exertion of his will. In other points, he had little to complain of, and much to rejoice in. He was happy in his family, the chosen scene of his sweetest, most lasting satisfaction; by the world he was honoured and admired; his wants were provided for; he had tasks which inspired and occupied him; friends who loved him, and whom he loved. Schiller had much to enjoy, and most of it he owed to himself.

In his mode of life at Jena, simplicity and uniformity were the most con

spicuous qualities, the single excess which he admitted being that of zeal in the pursuits of literature - the sin which all his life had most easily beset him. His health had suffered much, and principally, it was thought, from the practice of composing by night: yet the charms of this practice were still too great for his selfdenial; and, except in severe fits of sickness, he could not discontinue it. The highest, proudest pleasure of his mind was, that glow of intellectual production, that "fine frenzy," which makes the poet, while it lasts, a new and nobler creature; exalting him into brighter regions, adorned by visions of glorious beauty, and delighting all his faculties by the intense consciousness of their exerted power. To enjoy this pleasure in perfection, the solitary stillness of night diffusing its solemn influence over thought as well as earth and air, had at length in Schiller's case grown indispensable. For this purpose, accordingly, he was accustomed, in the present, as in former periods, to invert the common order of things: by day he read, refreshed himself with the aspect of nature, conversed or corresponded with his friends; but he wrote and studied in the night. And as his bodily feelings were too often those of languor and exhaustion, he adopted, in impatience of such mean impediments, the pernicious expedient of stimulants, which yield a momentary strength, only to waste our remaining fund of it more speedily and surely.

in a garden, which at length he purchased During summer, his place of study was in the suburbs of Jena, not far from the Weselhofts' house, where at that time was

the office of the Allgemeine Litteraturzeitung. Reckoning from the market-place of Jena, it lies on the south-west border of the town, between the Engelgatter and the Neuthor, in a hollow defile, through which a part of the Leutrabach flows round the city. On the top of the acclivity, from which there is a beautiful prospect into the valley of the Saal, and the fir mountains himself a small house with a single chamof the neighbouring forest, Schiller built ber. * It was his favourite abode during hours of composition; a great part of the

works he then wrote were written here. In winter he likewise dwelt apart from the noise of men; in the Griesbachs' house,

on the outside of the city-trench. ❤ On sitting down to his desk at nights, he was wont to keep some strong coffee, or wine-chocolate, but more frequently a flask of old Rhenish, or Champaign, standing by him, that he might from time to time repair the exhaustion of nature. Often the neighbours used to hear him earnestly declaiming, in the silence of the night: and whoever had an opportunity of watching him on such occasions,-a thing very easy to be done from the heights lying opposite his little garden-house, on the other side of the dell,-might see him now speaking aloud and walking swiftly to and fro in his chamber, then suddenly throwing himself down into his chair and writing; and drinking the while, at times more than once, from the glass standing near him. In winter, he was to be found at his desk till four, or even five o'clock in the morning; in summer, till towards three. He then went to bed, out of which he seldom

rose till nine or ten.*

Had prudence been the dominant quality in Schiller's character, this practice would undoubtedly have been abandoned, or rather, never taken up. It was an error so to waste his strength; but one of those which increase rather than diminish our respect: originating, as it did, in generous ardour for what was best and grandest, they must be cold censurers that can condemn it harshly. For ourselves, we but lament and honour this excess of zeal; its effects were mournful, but its origin was noble. The lovers of the picturesque will not learn without regret, that the small garden-house, which was the scene of it, yielding to the hand of time, crumbled into ruin some years ago, and is not now at all to be traced. This piece of ground is hallowed with a glory that is bright, pure, and abiding; but the literary pilgrim could not have surveyed without peculiar emotion the simple chamber in which Schiller wrote the Reich der Schatten, the Spaziergang, the Ideal, and the immortal scenes of Wallenstein.

The last-named work had cost him many an anxious, given him many a pleasant, hour. For seven years it had continued in a state of irregular, and oft suspended progress; sometimes" lying endless and formless before him; sometimes on the point

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of being given up entirely. The multitude of ideas which he wished to incorporate in the structure of the piece retarded him, and the difficulty of contenting his taste respecting the manner of effecting this retarded him still more. In Wallenstein, he wished to embody the more enlarged notions which experience had given him of men, especially which history had given him of generals and statesmen ; and while putting such characters in action, to represent whatever was, or could be made, poetical, in the stormy period of the Thirty Years' War. As he meditated on the subject, it continued to expand; in his fancy, it assumed successively a thousand forms; and after all due strictness of selection, such was still the extent of materials remaining on his hands, that he found it necessary to divide the play into three parts, distinct in their arrangement, but in truth forming a continuous drama of eleven acts. In this shape it was sent forth to the world, in 1799; a work of labour and persevering anxiety; but of anxiety and labour, as it then appeared, which had not been bestowed in vain. Wallenstein is by far the best performance he had yet produced; it merits a long chapter of criticism by itself; and we have only a few sentences which we can spend on it.

As a porch to the great edifice, stands part first, entitled Wallenstein's Camp, a piece in one act. It paints with much humour and graphical felicity the manners of that rude tumultuous host which Wallenstein presided over, and had made the engine of his ambitious schemes. Schiller's early experience of a military life seems now to have stood him in good stead: his soldiers are delineated with the distinctness of actual observation; in rugged sharpness of feature, they sometimes remind us of Smollett's seamen. Here are all the wild lawless spirits of Europe, assembled within the circuit of a single trench: violent, tempestuous, unstable is the life they lead. Ishmaelites, their hands against every man, and every man's hand against them; the instruments of rapine; tarnished with almost