While Schiller's literary output as a critic continued unabated in the ensuing years, his attention over the next decade (1787–1796) turned from the stage to the study of history and to an increasing preoccupation with philosophical treatments of morals and the arts. His History of the Revolt of the Netherlands (1787), which celebrated religious tolerance, won him a professorship (albeit unsalaried) in history at the University of Jena in 1789, and over the next two years he produced the enormously successful History of the Thirty Years War. His inaugural lecture, "What Does 'Universal History' Mean and to What End Is It Studied?" (1789) contains reflections, fairly conventional at the time, on history's progressive character. This progressive view of history collided, however, with a longing for a lost harmony that he thought art alone can provide (compare his nostalgic elegy of 1788, "The Gods of Greece," with his stirring, forward-looking call to his caste in the 1789 poem "The Artists").
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