this I have enclosed a sketch of one. For the rest, I have
the honour, with perfect respect, to be always,' &c.

This is the enclosed scheme of an Advertisement; which was
afterwards adopted:

'THE ROBBERS,

'A PLAY.

'The picture of a great, misguided soul, furnished with every
gift for excellence, and lost in spite of all its gifts:
unchecked ardour and bad companionship contaminate his heart;
hurry him from vice to vice, till at last he stands at the
head of a gang of murderers, heaps horror upon horror,
plunges from abyss to abyss into all the depths of
desperation. Great and majestic in misfortune; and by
misfortune improved, led back to virtue. Such a man in the
Robber Moor you shall "bewail and hate, abhor and love. A
hypocritical, malicious deceiver, you shall likewise see
unmasked, and blown to pieces in his own mines. A feeble,
fond, and too indulgent father. The sorrows of enthusiastic
love, and the torture of ungoverned passion. Here also, not
without abhorrence, you shall cast a look into the interior
economy of vice, and from the stage be taught how all the
gilding of fortune cannot kill the inward worm; how terror,
anguish, remorse, and despair follow close upon the heels of
the wicked. Let the spectator weep today before our scene,
and shudder, and learn to bend his passions under the laws of
reason and religion. Let the youth behold with affright the
end of unbridled extravagance; nor let the man depart from
our theatre, without a feeling that Providence makes even
villains instruments of His purposes and judgments, and can
marvellously unravel the most intricate perplexities of
fate.'

Whatever reverence Schiller entertained for Dalberg as a critic and a
patron, and however ready to adopt his alterations when they seemed
judicious, it is plain, from various passages of these extracts, that
in regard to writing, he had also firm persuasions of his own, and
conscientiousness enough to adhere to them while they continued such.
In regard to the conducting of his life, his views as yet were far
less clear. The following fragments serve to trace him from the first
exhibition of his play at Mannheim to his flight from Stuttgard:

'Stuttgard, 17th January 1782.

'I here in writing rep