success; and, if Germany may now boast with reason of her illustrious professors of Sanscrit; if France, under the Restoration made such rapid progress in oriental literature; if England, roused from her inglorious apathy, has at last founded an Asiatic society in London, and more recently, the Boden professorship at Oxford--these events are, in a great degree, attributable to the enthusiasm which this little book excited. In the year 1810, Schlegel delivered, at Vienna, a course of lectures on "Modern History." This book, which was in two volumes, 8vo., has long been out of print; and the volumes destined to contain it in the general collection of the author's works, have not yet been published. Hence no account of it can be here given--a circumstance which I the more regret, as, in the opinion of some, it is Schlegel's masterpiece. It embodied in a systematic form the views and opinions contained in a variety of the author's earlier historical essays, which are also out of print, and have not yet been re-published. In it, I know, are to be found the detailed proofs and evidences of many positions advanced in the second volume of the work, to which this Memoir is prefixed. We should, however, form a very inadequate estimate of the services this great writer has rendered to literature, and of the influence he has exerted on his age, were we to confine our attention solely to his larger works. Throughout his whole life, he was an assiduous contributor to periodical literature--a species of writing which, in the present age, has been cultivated with signal success in England, France and Germany. At the commencement of the present century, he edited in conjunction with Tieck, Novalis and his brother, a literary journal, entitled the Athenæum; and afterwards successively conducted political and philosophical journals, such as the "Europa,"--the "German Museum,"--and lastly the "Concordia;" giving latterly, also, his zealous support to the Vienna Quarterly Review. Some of his earlier critiques have already been noticed. Among the shorter literary essays, which appeared in the twelve years that elapsed from 1800 to 1812, I may notice the one entitled "the Epochs of Literature," 1800; and which may be considered the first rude outline of those immortal lectures on the "History of Literature," which he delivered in 1812. Often as he has occasion to treat the same subject, yet such is the inexhaustible wealth of his intellect, he seldom tires by repetition. Thus his minutest fragments, like the sketches of Raphael, are full of interest and variety. Another essay of the same year, "on the different style in Goethe's earlier and later works," shews with what a discriminating eye the young critic had already scanned all the heights and the depths of this wonderful poet. Of this great writer, the moral direction of some of whose writings he reprobated in the strongest degree, he did not hesitate to say that, like Dante in the middle age, he was the founder