ion of Dalberg, director of the theatre at Mannheim, who saw
its dramatic qualities and requested its author to revise it for the
stage. This Schiller readily consented to do. To please Dalberg he set
the action back from the eighteenth to the sixteenth century and made
many minor changes. The revised play was performed at Mannheim on
January 12, 1782, with ever-memorable success. The audience, assembled
from far and near, went wild with enthusiasm. No such triumph had been
achieved before on a German stage. The author himself saw the
performance, having come over from Stuttgart without leave of absence.
For this breach of discipline, or rather for a repetition of the
offense in May, he was sent to the guardhouse for a fortnight and
forbidden to write any more plays. The consequence was a clandestine
flight from a situation that had become intolerable. In September,
1782, he escaped from Stuttgart with his loyal friend Streicher and
took his way northward toward the Palatinate. He had set his hopes on
finding employment in Mannheim.

[Illustration: SCHILLER'S FATHER AND MOTHER]

Before leaving his native Swabia he had virtually completed a second
play dealing with the conspiracy of Count Fiesco at Genoa in the year
1547. He had also won his spurs as a poet and a critic. His _Anthology
for 1782_ contains a large number of short poems, some of them
evincing a rare talent for dramatic story-telling, others
foreshadowing the imaginative sweep and the warmth of feeling which
characterize the best poetic work of the later Schiller. Such,
notably, are the poems to Laura, in which the lover's raptures are
linked with the law of gravitation and the preestablished harmony of
the world. He also contributed several papers to the Wuerttemberg
_Repertorium_, especially a review of _The Robbers_ in which,
dissecting his own child with remorseless impartiality, he anticipated
nearly everything that critics were destined to urge against the play
during the next hundred years. Having left his post of duty and
being a military officer, Schiller was technically a deserter and had
reason to fear pursuit and arrest. At Mannheim his affairs went badly.
The politic Dalberg was not eager to befriend a youth who had offended
the powerful Duke of Wuerttemberg; so _Fiesco_ was rejected and its
author came into dire straits. Toward the close of the year he found a
welcome refuge at Bauerbach, where a house was put at his disposal by
his friend Fr