be settled by indisputable evidence in favor of Ferdinando, there would
be no _casus belli_; the younger son would bow to the law of
primogeniture and that would end the matter. Schiller, however, felt the
need of a bolder contrast to his hero. The 'sublime criminal' required a
colossal foil; and as equality with the sword was out of the question,
the most obvious recourse was to pit natural depravity against natural
greatness; scheming intellect against hot blood.

In working out his conception Schiller took counsel freely of Shakspere,
whose name had now become for young Germany the symbol of all things
great in dramatic writing. The first soliloquy of Franz Moor reminds one
at once of Edmund in 'Lear', though there is none of the kind of
borrowing which makes easy prey for the philologist. Both villains covet
the wealth and station of a preferred brother; both make use of a
specious obstetrical argument and both operate with forged letters. In
general, however, the portrait of Franz was more influenced by Richard
the Third than by Edmund, or Iago, or any of the other Shaksperian
villains. Franz is the British Richard divested of his Shaksperian
lordliness, transferred to a humbler sphere of action and provided with
the mental outfit of an eighteenth-century _philosophe_, as seen by
hostile critics. Both descant on their own deformity and confide to the
public their villainous designs. But while Richard speaks in a tone of
genial cynicism, as if his principal concern were only to bring a little
variety into the tameness of "these fair, well-spoken days", the German
villain solemnly turns himself inside out and regales us _ad nauseam_
with the metaphysics of iniquity. This is his mode of reasoning:

Why did nature put upon me this burden of ugliness--this Laplander's
nose, this Moorish mouth, these Hottentot eyes? Death and
destruction! Why was she such a partisan?--But no, I do her