eory, who studies to
accomplish his object by the most diabolical expedients, and soothes
his conscience by arguing with the priest in favour of atheism and
materialism; not the genuine villain of Shakspeare and Nature, who
employs his reasoning powers in creating new schemes and devising new
means, and conquers remorse by avoiding it,--by fixing his hopes and
fears on the more pressing emergencies of worldly business. So
reflective a miscreant as Franz could not exist: his calculations
would lead him to honesty, if merely because it was the best policy.

Amelia, the only female in the piece, is a beautiful creation; but as
imaginary as her persecutor Franz. Still and exalted in her warm
enthusiasm, devoted in her love to Moor, she moves before us as the
inhabitant of a higher and simpler world than ours. "_He_ sails on
troubled seas," she exclaims, with a confusion of metaphors, which it
is easy to pardon, "he sails on troubled seas, Amelia's love sails
with him; he wanders in pathless deserts, Amelia's love makes the
burning sand grow green beneath him, and the stunted shrubs to
blossom; the south scorches his bare head, his feet are pinched by the
northern snow, stormy hail beats round his temples--Amelia's love
rocks him to sleep in the storm. Seas, and hills, and horizons, are
between us; but souls escape from their clay prisons, and meet in the
paradise of love!" She is a fair vision, the _beau ideal_ of a poet's
first mistress; but has few mortal lineaments.

Similar defects are visible in almost all the other characters. Moor,
the father, is a weak and fond old man, who could have arrived at gray
hairs in such a state of ignorance nowhere but in a work of fiction.
The inferior banditti are painted with greater vigour, yet still in
rugged and ill-shapen forms; their individuality is kept up by an
extravagant exaggeration of their several peculiarities. Schiller
himself pronounced a severe but not unfounded censure, when he said of
this work, in a maturer age, that his _chief_ fault was in 'presuming
to delineate men two years before he had met one.'

His skill in the art of composition surpassed his knowledge of the
world; but that too was far from perfection. Schiller's style in the
_Robbers_ is partly of a kind with the incidents and feelings which it
represents; strong and astonishing, and sometimes wildly grand; but
likewise inartificial, coarse, and grotesque. His sentences, in their
rude emphasis, come d