proaches more nearly to the tragedians of antiquity. He utterly
discarded the limited range of subjects, and measured pomp of the French
drama; he felt that the world had grown old since the days of Euripides,
and that it was time for tragedy to embrace a wider range of subjects
than the family disasters which followed the return of the Greeks from
the siege of Troy. He knew that it was not in stately rhyme or measured
cadences, that passion finds vent from the human breast. He was
essentially historical in his ideas. The past with its vast changes and
endless variety of events, lay open before him. And he availed himself
of all its riches. He is unequalled in the ability with which he threw
himself into his subject, identified himself, not merely with the
characters, but the periods in which they arose, and brought before the
mind of the spectators the ideas, interests, passions, and incidents,
the collision of which produced the catastrophe which formed the
immediate subject of his piece. The best informed English or Scottish
historians will have something to learn on the history of Queen Mary,
from the incomparable summary of arguments for and against her detention
in captivity by Queen Elizabeth, in the two first acts of his noble
tragedy of _Mary Stuart_. The learned Spaniard will find himself
transported to the palace of the Escurial, and the frightful tragedies
of its bigoted court, in his terrible tragedy of _Don Carlos_. Schiller
rivals Shakspeare himself in the energy with which, by a word or an
epithet, he paints the fiercest or tenderest passions of the heart:
witness the devoted love of Thekla for Max in _Wallenstein_; or the
furious jealousy of the Queen in _Don Carlos_. He has not the grotesque
of Shakspeare; we do not see in his tragedies that mixture of the
burlesque and the sublime which is so common in the Bard of Avon, and
is not infrequent with the greatest minds, who play, as it were, with
the thunderbolts, and love to show how they can master them. Hence, in
reading at least, his dramas produce a more uniform and unbroken
impression than those of the great Englishman, and will, with foreign
nations, command a more general admiration. But the great charm in
Schiller is the romantic turn of mind, the noble elevation of sentiment,
the truly heroic spirit, with which his tragedies abound. In reading
them, we feel that a new intellectual soil has been turned up in the
Fatherland; the human soul, in its p