CHAPTER I

Parentage and Schooling

Nur, Vater, mir Gesaenge.

_From the poem 'Evening', 1776._

When the Austrian War of Succession came to an end, in the year 1748, a
certain young Suabian who had been campaigning in the Lowlands as army
doctor was left temporarily without employment. The man's name was
Johann Kaspar Schiller; he was of good plebeian stock and had lately
been a barber's apprentice,--a lot that he had accepted reluctantly when
the poverty of a widowed mother compelled him to shift for himself at an
early age. Having served his time and learned the trade of the
barber-surgeon, he had joined a Bavarian regiment of hussars. Finding
himself now suddenly at leisure, after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, he
mounted his horse and rode away to the land of his birth to visit his
relations. Reaching Marbach--it was now the spring of 1749--he put up at
the 'Golden Lion', an inn kept by a then prosperous baker named Kodweis.
Here he fell in love with his landlord's daughter Dorothea, a girl of
sixteen, and in the course of the summer married her. He was at this
time about twenty-six years old. He now settled down In Marbach to
practice his crude art, but the practice came to little and Kodweis soon
lost his property in foolish speculation. So the quondam soldier fell
out of humor with Marbach, went into the army again, and when the Seven
Years' War broke out, in 1756, he took the field with a Wuerttemberg
regiment to fight the King of Prussia. He soon reached the grade of