age,--with a row of chairs for an audience, and himself as manager and
protagonist.

Christophine relates that her brother's fondness for this sort of
diversion lasted until he was thirteen years old. In the mean time,
however, his chosen career was kept steadily in view. He was sent to the
Latin school, from which, if his marks should be good, he might hope to
advance in about five years to one of the so-called convent schools of
Wuerttemberg. After this his theological education would proceed for
about nine years more at the expense of the state. The Ludwigsburg
school was a place in which the language of Cicero and the religion of
Luther were thumped into the memory of boys by means of sticks applied
to the skin; Fritz Schiller was a capable scholar, though none of his
teachers ever called him, as in the case of the boy Lessing at Meissen,
a horse that needed double fodder. The ordinary ration sufficed him, but
he memorized his catechism and his hymns diligently, fussed faithfully
over his Latin longs and shorts, and took his occasional thrashings with
becoming fortitude. On one occasion we hear that he was flogged by
mistake and disdained to report the incident at home. Religious
instruction consisted of mechanical repetition insisted on with brutal
severity,--a mode of presenting divine things that must have contrasted
painfully, for the sensitive boy, with his mother's simple religion of
the heart. When it is added that he was often nagged and punished by a
too exacting father, we get a not very sunny picture of our poet's
boyhood. It is told,[5] and it may well be true, that he was subject to
fits of moodiness, in which he would complain of his lot and brood
gloomily over his prospects. Nevertheless a schoolmate[6] has left it on
record that Schiller as a lad was normally high-spirited, a leader in
sports as well as in study, and very steadfast in his friendships.