Even apparently insignificant details are suggestive. The manuscripts are not always in A. W. Schlegel's handwriting. He set to work upon _Romeo and Juliet_ in the winter of 1795-96; in 1796 he married Caroline Böhmer; and we have a complete copy of the first rough draft of the play in Caroline's handwriting, with corrections in Schlegel's. In September 1797, as her letters show, she copied _As You Like It_ from an almost illegible manuscript. And she was more than a mere copyist. She collaborated with Schlegel in his essay on _Romeo and Juliet_, which ranks next to Goethe's disquisitions on _Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister_ as the best Shakespeare criticism produced in Germany up to that time. We recognise her now and again in some outburst of womanly feeling, or in a greater freedom of style than we are accustomed to in Schlegel. She had a far truer understanding than her contemporaries of the full significance of a work, the aim of which was the incorporation of Shakespeare in his unalloyed entirety into German literature. But her interest in the work and the labourer did not, as the manuscripts show us, survive the first year of her married life. At first it is her handwriting which predominates, and, though it is less frequently to be seen alongside of her husband's in the manuscripts of those plays with which he was occupied during the years 1797-98, her collaboration is still apparent. We find the last traces of her pen in the manuscript of the _Merchant of Venice_, which dates from the autumn of 1798. In October of that year, Schelling joined the Romanticist circle in Jena. Thenceforward no more of Caroline's handwriting is discoverable. Among the manuscripts in question, two give us a very distinct idea of the progress of Schlegel's intellectual development. They are two different texts of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_. Before A. W. Schlegel's time no one in Germany, or elsewhere, had attempted to translate Shakespeare line for line. The two tame prose translations by Wieland and Eschenburg were, in fact, all that existed. As a student in Göttingen, Schlegel made the first attempt to reproduce in German verse parts of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_. From childhood he had been "an indefatigable verse-maker." His talent was obviously inherited. Half a century before he and his brother made their appearance, two brothers Schlegel had made a name for themselves in literature--Johann Elias, who lived for many years in Copenhagen, was a friend of Holberg, and, in everything connected with the stage, a forerunner of Lessing, and Johann Adolph, father of August Wilhelm and Friedrich, who, without much originality, possessed decided linguistic and plastic talent.