The brothers Schlegel belonged to what Frederick in his lectures calls the third generation of modern German literature. The whole period from 1750 to 1800, being divided into three generations, the first comprehends all those whose period of greatest activity falls into the first decade, from 1750 to 1760, and thereabout. Its chief heroes are Wieland, Klopstock, and Lessing. These men of course were all born before the year 1730. The second generation extends from 1770 to 1790, and thereabouts, and presents a development, which stands to the first in the relation of summer to spring--Goethe and Schiller are the two names by which it will be sent down to posterity. Of these the one was born in 1749, and the other in 1759. Then follows that third generation to which Schlegel himself belongs, and which is more generally known in literary history as the era of the Romantic school--a school answering both in chronology, and in many points of character also, to what we call the Lake school in England. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, are contemporaries of Tieck, Novalis, and the Schlegels. Their political contemporaries are Napoleon and Wellington. The event which gave a direction to their literary development, no less decidedly than it did to the political history of Europe, was the French Revolution. Accordingly, we find that all these great European characters--for so they all are more or less--made the all-important passage from youth into manhood during the ferment of the years that followed that ominous date, 1789. This coincidence explains the celebrity of the famous biographical year 1769--Walter Scott was born in that year, Wellington and Napoleon, as every body knows--and the elder Aristarchus of the Romantic school, _the_ translator of Shakspeare, Augustus William Von Schlegel was born in 1767. At Hanover, five years later, was born his brother Frederick, that is to say, in May 1772, and our Coleridge in the same year--and to carry on the parallel for another year, Ludwig Tieck, Henry Steffens, and Novalis, were all born in 1773. These dates are curious; when taken along with the great fact of the age--the French Revolution--they may serve to that family likeness which we have noted in characterizing the Romanticists in Germany and the Lake school in England. When Coleridge here was dreaming of America and Pantisocracy, Frederick Schlegel was studying Plato, and scheming republics there.[K] In the first years of his literary career Schlegel devoted himself chiefly to classical literature; and between 1794 and 1797 published several works on Greek and Roman poetry and philosophy, the substance of which was afterwards concentrated into the four first lectures on the history of literature. About this time he appears to have lived chiefly by his literary exertions--a method of obtaining a livelihood very precarious, (as those know best who have tried it,) and to men of a turn of mind more philosophical than popular, even in