he haunting fear of insanity in
that other who is the subject of this sketch.

That Franz Grillparzer was destined to no happy childhood is obvious,
and it is equally clear that he needed a strong will to overcome not
merely material obstacles to progress but also inherited dispositions of
such antithetical sort. The father and the mother were at war in his
breast. Like the mother in sensitiveness and imaginativeness, he was the
son of his father in a stern censoriousness that was quick to ridicule
what appeared to be nonsense in others and in himself; but he was the
son of his father also in clearness of understanding and devotion to
duty as he saw it.

Grillparzer once said that his works were detached fragments of his
life; and though many of their themes seem remote from him in time and
place, character and incident in them are unmistakably enriched by being
often conceived in the light of personal experience. Outwardly,
however, his life was comparatively uneventful. After irregular studies
with private tutors and at school, Grillparzer studied law from 1807 to
1811 at the University of Vienna, gave instruction from 1810 to 1813 to
the sons of various noblemen, and in 1813 began in the Austrian civil
service the humdrum career which, full of disappointments and undeserved
setbacks, culminated in his appointment in 1832 to the directorship of
the _Hofkammerarchiv,_ and lasted until his honorable retirement in
1856. He was a conscientious official; but throughout this time he was
regarded, and regarded himself, primarily as Grillparzer the poet; and
in spite of loyalty to the monarchy, he was entirely out of sympathy
with the antediluvian administration of Metternich and his successors.
Little things, magnified by pusillanimous apprehension, stood in his
way. In 1819 he expressed in a poem _The Ruins of Campo Vaccino_
esthetic abhorrence of the cross most inappropriately placed over the
portal of the Coliseum in Rome, and was thereafter never free of the
suspicion of heresy. In 1825 membership in a social club raided by the
police subjected him to the absurd suspicion of plotting treason. Only
once do we find him, during the first half of the century, _persona
gratissima_ with the powers that be. Grillparzer firmly disapproved the
disintegrating tendencies of the revolution of 1848, and uttered his
sense of the duty of loyal cooeperation under the Habsburgs in a spirited
poem, _To Field-Marshal Count Radetzky_. For