Stuart' and a 'Friedrich Imhof', whatever this last may have been.
Nothing is known of it save that it was to deal with Jesuitical
intrigue, the Inquisition, religious fanaticism, the history of the
Bastille, and the passion for gambling.[50] By the end of March he had
decided, after long vacillation between these two themes, to drop both
of them and proceed with 'Don Carlos'.

He began in prose, identifying himself completely with his hero and
writing with joyous enthusiasm. A letter of April 14 to Reinwald deals
at length with love and friendship and their relation to poetic
creation. All love, we read, is at bottom love of ourselves. We see in
the beloved person the sundered elements of our own being, and the soul
yearns to perfect itself in the process of reunion. Thus love and
friendship are of the nature of poetic imagination,--the waking into
life of a pleasing illusion. Wherefore the poet must love his
characters. He must not be the painter of his hero, but rather his
hero's sweetheart or bosom friend. Then he makes the application to Don
Carlos in these words:

I must confess to you that in a sense he takes the place of my
sweetheart, I carry him in my heart,--_ich schwaerme mit ihm durch
die Gegend um_.... He shall have the soul of Shakspere's Hamlet,
the blood and nerves of Leisewitz's Julius, and his pulse from me.
Besides that I shall make it my duty in this play, in my picture
of the Inquisition, to avenge outraged mankind ... and pierce to
the heart a sort of men whom the dagger of tragedy has hitherto
only grazed.

But the 'bosom friend' of Don Carlos soon had his thoughts pulled in
other directions. In the first place there came, very unexpectedly, a