After receiving a very limited education he was apprenticed to a linen manufacturer, but, finding the employment uncongenial, he resumed school-life at the institution founded by Wesley at Kingswood, near Bristol.
One was propitious to marriage, another to entrance upon school-life, a third to the first ploughing, a fourth to laying the foundation of a house.
The strict military discipline of the school lay heavily on Schiller, and intensified the spirit of rebellion, which, nurtured on Rousseau and the writers of the Sturm and Drang, burst out in the young poet's first tragedy; but such a school-life had for a poet of Schiller's temperament advantages which he might not have known had he followed his own inclinations; and it afforded him glimpses of court life invaluable for his later work as a dramatist.
The strength of this remarkable tragedy lay, not in its inflated tone or exaggerated characterization - the restricted horizon of Schiller's school-life had given him little opportunity of knowing men and women - but in the sure dramatic instinct with which it is constructed and the directness with which it gives voice to the most pregnant ideas of the time.