lieutenant, in time that of captain; fought and ran with his countrymen,
at Leuthen, floundered at peril of life in the swamps of Breslau and
otherwise got his full share of the war's rough-and-tumble. From time to
time, as the chance came to him, he visited his young wife in Marbach.

These were the parents of the poet Schiller, who was born November 10,
1759, ten years after Goethe, ten years before Napoleon. It is worth
remembering that he who was to be in his way, another great protestant
came into the world on an anniversary of the birth of Lather. He was
christened Johann Christoph Friedrich.

The childhood of little Fritz unfolded amid conditions that must have
given to life a rather somber aspect. After the close of the war Captain
Schiller moved his little family to Lorch, a village some thirty miles
east of Stuttgart, where he was employed by the Duke of Wuerttemberg in
recruiting soldiers for mercenary service abroad. This hateful business,
which was in due time to form a mark for one of the sharp darts of
'Cabal and Love', seems to have been managed by him with a degree of
tact and humanity; for he won the esteem of all with whom he had to do.
At home, being of a pious turn and setting great store by the formal
exercises of religion, he presided over his household in the manner of
an ancient patriarch. Between him and his son no very tender relation
ever existed, though the poet of later years always revered his father's
character. The child's affections clung rather to his mother, whom he
grew up to resemble in form and feature and in traits of character. She
was a woman of no intellectual pretensions, but worthy of honor for her
qualities of heart.[1] Of education in the modern sense she had but
little. Her few extant letters, written mostly in her later years, tell
of a simple and lovable character, tenderly devoted to husband and
children. Tradition credits her with a certain liking for feeble poets