pple-marks of its first invasion are
still discernible in English poetry and prose. Southey was clearly in
error when he wrote to Taylor, September 5, 1798: "Coleridge's ballad,
'The Ancient Mariner' is, I think, the clumsiest attempt at German
sublimity I ever saw."[39] The "Mariner" is not in the least German, and
when he wrote it, Coleridge had not been in Germany and did not know the
language. He had read "Die Rauber," to be sure, some years before in
Tytler's translation. He was at Cambridge at the time, and one night in
winter, on leaving the room of a college friend, carelessly picked up and
took away with him a copy of the tragedy, the very name of which he had
never heard before. "A winter midnight, the wind high and 'The Robbers'
for the first time. The readers of Schiller will conceive what I felt."
He recorded, in the sonnet "To Schiller" (written December, 1794, or
January, 1795), the terrific impression left upon his imagination by

--"The famished father's cry
From the dark dungeon of the tower time-rent,"

and wish that he might behold the bard himself, wandering at eve--

"Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood."

Coleridge was destined to make the standard translation of "Wallenstein";
and there are motives borrowed from "The Robbers" and "The Ghost-Seer" in
his own very rubbishy dramas, "Zapolya"--of which Scott made some use in
"Peveril of the Peak"--and "Osorio" (1797). The latter was rewritten as
"Remorse," put on at Drury Lane January 23, 1813, and ran twenty nights.
It had been rejected by Sheridan, who expressed a very proper contempt
for it as an acting play. The Rev. W. L. Bowles and Byron, who had read
it in manuscript and strangely overvalued it, both made interest with the
manager to have it tried on the stage. "Remorse" also took some hints
from Lewis' "Monk."

But Coleridge came in time to hold in low esteem, if not precisely "The
Robbers" itself, yet that school of German melodrama of which it was the
grand exemplar. In the twenty-third chapter of the "Biographia
Literaria" (1817) he reviewed with severity the Rev. Charles Robert
Maturin's tragedy "Bertram, or the Castle of St. Aldobrand,"[40] and
incidentally gave the genesis of that whole theatric species "which it
has been the fashion, of late years, at once to abuse and to enjoy under
the name of the German Drama. Of this latter Schiller's 'Robbers' was
the earliest specimen, the first-fruit