Perhaps nowhere outside of his own Wuerttemberg could he have been more unfavorably situated in this respect.  Under Karl Eugen (1744-1793) the country sank into a deplorable condition.  Regardless of the rights of individuals and communities alike, he sought in the early part of his reign to replenish his depleted purse by the most shameless measures, in order that he might surround himself with luxury and indulge his autocratic proclivities.  Among his most reprehensible violations of constitutional rights, were his bartering of privileges and offices and the selling of troops.  These things Hoelderlin attacks in one of his youthful poems “Die Ehrsucht” (1788): 

    Um wie Koenige zu prahlen, schaenden
    Kleine Wuetriche ihr armes Land;
    Und um feile Ordensbaender wenden
    Raete sich das Ruder aus der Hand.[43]

Another act of gross injustice which this petty tyrant perpetrated, and which Hoelderlin must have felt very painfully, was the incarceration of the poet’s countryman Schubart from 1777 to 1787 in the Hohenasperg.  But not only from within came tyrannous oppression.  Following upon the coalition against France after the Revolution, Wuerttemberg became the scene of bloody conflicts and the ravages of war.  Under the regime of Friedrich Eugen (1795-97) the French gained such a foothold in Wuerttemberg that the country had to pay a contribution of four million gulden to get rid of them.  These were the conditions under which Hoelderlin grew up into young manhood.  But deeper than in the mere existence of these conditions themselves lay the cause of the poet’s most abject humiliation and grief.  It was the stoic indifference, the servile submission with which he charged his compatriots, that called forth his bitterest invectives upon their insensible heads.  His own words will serve best to show the intensity of his feelings.  In 1788 he writes, in the poem “Am Tage der Freundschaftsfeier:” 

    Da sah er (der Schwaermer) all die Schande
    Der weichlichen Teutonssoehne,
    Und fluchte dem verderblichen Ausland
    Und fluchte den verdorbenen Affen des Auslands,
    Und weinte blutige Thraenen,
    Dass er vielleicht noch lange
    Verweilen muesse unter diesem Geschlecht.[44]

Ten years later he treats the Germans to the following ignominious comparison: 

    Spottet ja nicht des Kinds, wenn es mit Peitsch’ und Sporn
    Auf dem Rosse von Holz, mutig und gross sich duenkt. 
    Denn, ihr Deutschen, auch ihr seid
    Thatenarm und gedankenvoll.[45]

With his friend Sinclair, who was sent as a delegate, he attended the congress at Rastatt in November, 1798, and here he made observations which no doubt resulted in the bitter characterization of his nation in the closing letters of Hyperion.  This convention, whose chief object was the compensation of those German princes who had been dispossessed by the cessions to France on the left bank of the Rhine, afforded a