a Bavarian Hussar
Regiment, as "Army-Doctor," into the Netherlands. Here, as his active
mind found no full employment in the practice of his Art, he willingly
undertook, withal, the duties of a sub-officer in small military
enterprises. On the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1748, when a part of
this Regiment was disbanded, and Schiller with them, he returned to
his homeland; and set himself down in Marbach, a pleasant little
country town on the Neckar, as practical Surgeon there. Here, in
1749, he married the Poet's Mother; then a young girl of sixteen:
Elisabetha Dorothea, born at Marbach in the year 1733, the daughter of
a respectable townsman, Georg Friedrich Kodweis, who, to his trade of
Baker adding that of Innkeeper and Woodmeasurer, had gathered a little
fortune, and was at this time counted well-off, though afterwards, by
some great inundation of the Neckar,' date not given, 'he was again
reduced to poverty. The brave man by this unavoidable mischance came,
by degrees, so low that he had to give-up his house in the
Market-Place, and in the end to dwell in a poor hut, as Porter at one
of the Toll-Gates of Marbach. Elisabetha was a comely girl to look
upon; slender, well-formed, without quite being tall; the neck long,
hair high-blond, almost red, brow broad, eyes as if a little sorish,
face covered with freckles; but with all these features enlivened by a
soft expression of kindliness and good-nature.

'This marriage, for the first eight years, was childless; after that,
they gradually had six children, two of whom died soon after birth;
the Poet Schiller was the second of these six, and the only Boy. The
young couple had to live in a very narrow, almost needy condition, as
neither of them had any fortune; and the Husband's business could
hardly support a household. There is still in existence a legal
Marriage Record and Inventory, such as is usual in these cases, which
estimates the money and money's worth brought together by the young
people at a little over 700 gulden (70_l._). Out of the same
Inventory, one sees, by the small value put upon the surgical
instruments, and the outstanding debts of patients, distinctly enough,
that Caspar Schiller's practice, at that point of time, did not much
exceed that of a third-class Surgeon, and was scarcely adequate, as
above stated, to support the thriftiest household. And therefore it is
not surprising that Schiller, intent on improving so bare a position,
should, at the br