t the village of
Lorch, where Captain Schiller was employed as recruiting officer. From
there they moved, in 1766, to Ludwigsburg, where the extravagant duke
Karl Eugen had taken up his residence and was bent on creating a sort
of Swabian Versailles. Here little Fritz went to school and was
sometimes taken to the gorgeous ducal opera, where he got his first
notions of scenic illusion. The hope of his boyhood was to become a
preacher, but this pious aspiration was brought to naught by the offer
of free tuition in an academy which the duke had started at his Castle
Solitude near Stuttgart.

This academy was Schiller's world from his fourteenth to his
twenty-first year. It was an educational experiment conceived in a
rather liberal spirit as a training-school for public service. At
first the duke had the boys taught under his own eye at Castle
Solitude, where they were subjected to a strict military discipline.
There being no provision for the study of divinity, Schiller was put
into law, with the result that he floundered badly for two years. In
1775 the institution was augmented by a faculty of medicine and
transferred to Stuttgart, where it was destined to a short-lived
career under the name of the Karlschule. Schiller gladly availed
himself of the permission to change from law to medicine, which he
thought would be more in harmony with his temperament and literary
ambitions. And so it proved. As a student of medicine he made himself
at home in the doctrines and practices of the day, and for several
years after he left school he thought now and then of returning to the
profession of medicine.

For posterity the salient fact of his long connection with the
Karlschule is that he was there converted into a fiery radical and a
banner-bearer of the literary revolution. Just how it came about is
hard to explain in detail. The school was designed to produce docile
and contented members of the social order; in him it bred up a savage
and relentless critic of that order. The result may be ascribed
partly, no doubt, to the natural reaction of an ardent, liberty-loving
temperament against a system of rigid discipline and petty espionage.
The _eleves_--French was the official language of the school--were not
supposed to read dangerous books, and their rooms were often searched
for contraband literature. But they easily found ways to evade the
rule and enjoy the savor of forbidden fruit.

[Illustration: FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER]