the ominous legend: 'at the expense of the editors'. To this journal
Schiller contributed various essays and reviews which show that as a
critic he had been influenced by Lessing, but had not acquired the knack
of Lessing's luminous and straightforward style. In a rather badly
written paper on 'The Present Condition of the German Theater', he takes
up a question which was destined to interest him later,--that of the
relation of the drama to morality. He has no difficulty in showing that
people are not deterred from the vices or impelled to the virtues that
they see represented on the stage.

But by far the most important of these contributions to the _Repertory_
are two reviews (of course anonymous) of his own writings. In a long
notice of 'The Robbers' he discusses the work with a coolness that is
simply amazing. His own child has become a _corpus vile_ that he has
the nerve to dissect without the slightest tremor of parental sympathy.
Nearly everything that a century's criticism has found to urge against
the play,--the dubiousness of the entire invention, the impossibility
of such a devil as Franz, the insipidity of Amalia and the old Count
Moor, the faults of the diction and the barbarism of the action,--is
here set forth with remorseless severity. The review closes with the
facetious comment which appears at the head of this chapter. Not quite
so caustic is the notice of the 'Anthology', but it contains a
significant 'admonition to our young poets' to the effect that
'extravagance is not strength, that violation of the rules of taste and
propriety is not boldness and originality, that fancy is not feeling,
and high-flown rhetoric is not the talisman on which the arrows of
criticism break and recoil'.

Verily it is not given every young author to see himself thus clearly
in the glass of criticism. We may guess, however, that these critical