stage.  The author himself saw the performance, having come over from Stuttgart without leave of absence.  For this breach of discipline, or rather for a repetition of the offense in May, he was sent to the guardhouse for a fortnight and forbidden to write any more plays.  The consequence was a clandestine flight from a situation that had become intolerable.  In September, 1782, he escaped from Stuttgart with his loyal friend Streicher and took his way northward toward the Palatinate.  He had set his hopes on finding employment in Mannheim.

[Illustration:  Schiller’s father and mother]

Before leaving his native Swabia he had virtually completed a second play dealing with the conspiracy of Count Fiesco at Genoa in the year 1547.  He had also won his spurs as a poet and a critic.  His Anthology for 1782 contains a large number of short poems, some of them evincing a rare talent for dramatic story-telling, others foreshadowing the imaginative sweep and the warmth of feeling which characterize the best poetic work of the later Schiller.  Such, notably, are the poems to Laura, in which the lover’s raptures are linked with the law of gravitation and the preestablished harmony of the world.  He also contributed several papers to the Wuerttemberg Repertorium, especially a review of The Robbers in which, dissecting his own child with remorseless impartiality, he anticipated nearly everything that critics were destined to urge against the play during the next hundred years.  Having left his post of duty and being a military officer, Schiller was technically a deserter and had reason to fear pursuit and arrest.  At Mannheim his affairs went badly.  The politic Dalberg was not eager to befriend a youth who had offended the powerful Duke of Wuerttemberg; so Fiesco was rejected and its author came into dire straits.  Toward the close of the year he found a welcome refuge at Bauerbach, where a house was put at his disposal by his friend Frau von Wolzogen.  Here he remained several months, occupied mainly with a new play which came to be known as Cabal and Love.  He also sketched a historical tragedy, Don Carlos, being led to the subject by his reading of St. Real’s historical novel Don Carlos.  During the first part of his stay at Bauerbach Schiller went by the name of Dr. Ritter and wrote purposely misleading letters as to his intended movements.  By the summer of 1783, however, it had become apparent that the Duke of Wuerttemberg was not going to make trouble.  Relieved of anxiety on this score, and not having had very good success of late with his theatre, Dalberg reopened negotiations with Schiller, who was easily persuaded to emerge from his hiding-place and become theatre-poet at Mannheim under contract for one year.