n the contagion of these ideas, there settled in Jena in
1796 the two phenomenal Schlegel brothers. It is not easy or necessary
to separate, at this period, the activities of their agile minds. From
their early days, as sons in a most respectable Lutheran parsonage in
North Germany, both had shown enormous hunger for cultural
information, both had been voracious in exploiting the great libraries
within their reach. It is generally asserted that they were lacking in
essential virility and stamina; as to the brilliancy of their
acquisitions, their fineness of appreciation, and their wit, there can
be no question whatever. Madame de Stael called them "the fathers of
modern criticism," a title which has not been challenged by the best
authorities of our time.

Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829), the younger of the two, is counted
to be the keener and more original mind. He had a restless and
unsettled youth, mostly spent in studies; after various
disappointments, he determined to make classical antiquity his
life-work; while mastering the body of ancient literature, he was
assimilating, with much the same sort of eagerness, the philosophical
systems of Kant and Fichte. His first notable publication was an
esthetic-philosophic essay, in the ample style of Schiller's later
discourses, _Concerning the Study of Greek Poetry_. He found in the
Greeks of the age of Sophocles the ideal of a fully developed
humanity, and exhibited throughout the discussion a remarkable mastery
of the whole field of classical literature. Just at this time he
removed to Jena to join his older brother, Wilhelm, who was connected
with Schiller's monthly _The Hours_ and his annual _Almanac of the
Muses_. By a strange condition of things Friedrich was actively
engaged at the moment in writing polemic reviews for the organs of
Reichardt, one of Schiller's most annoying rivals in literary
journalism; these reviews became at once noticeable for their depth
and vigorous originality, particularly that one which gave a new and
vital characterization of Lessing. In 1797 he moved to Berlin, where
he gathered a group about him, including Tieck, and in this way
established the external and visible body of the Romantic School,
which the brilliant intellectual atmosphere of the Berlin salons, with
their wealth of gifted and cultured women, did much to promote. In
1799 both he and Tieck joined the Romantic circle at Jena.

In Berlin he published in 1798 the first vo