JOHANN CHRISTOPH FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER was born at Marbach, in the German Duchy of Würtemberg, on the 10th of November, 1759, and died at Weimar, May 9, 1805. His father was major in the army, and overseer of the Ducal gardens near Stuttgart, the capital. The young Schiller was trained at a Latin school in Lud

wigsburg, and from thirteen to twenty-one, he was a member of the Military Academy, where he studied medicine, and became surgeon of a regiment. His early taste for poetry led him to devote much of his time to literary studies, and, spite of the harsh discipline of the school, he devoured forbidden books-Rousseau, Goethe, etc., imbibing at once a passion for literature and an ardent devotion to the cause of intellectual freedom.

Into his brief life of forty-five years Schiller crowded more of intellectual and moral achievement than any other man of his age. Why is he yet regarded by his countrymen with a love and reverence amounting almost to a passion? His was no cosmopolitan, nor even metropolitan, career. Schiller never left Germany. He came into an age in which there was no daily newspaper, no railway, no steamship, no telegraph, no popular suffrage. He toiled all his life for what would now be deemed a miserable pittance, running up from the starvation pay of a surgeon of grenadiers at eight dollars a month, to what, in his later Weimar life, he termed the comparative affluence of sixteen hundred dollars a year.