no common order; but his literary activity was of too desultory

a nature to produce any lasting monument of his genius. His tragedy of "Alarkos," for instance, in which he strangely intermingled classic and romantic elements, was a complete failure. His chief merit lies in the romantic turn which, in conjunction with his brother, with Tieck, and others, he helped to give to German literature. The brothers Schlegel in particular are considered the fathers of the romantic school, and their influence as such can hardly be overrated.—K. E. SCHLEIERMACHER, Friedrich Daniel Ernst, the most influential theologian of protestant Germany that has appeared during the present century, was born in Breslau, on the 21st of November, 1768. His father was a military chaplain of the Reformed church, as distinguished from the Lutheran; and till his fourteenth year his education was chiefly superintended by his mother, who was a woman of superior understanding and deep piety. In 1783 he was sent to a Moravian school at Niesky in Upper Lusatia, where his brilliant talents drew upon him a degree of admiration which operated unfavourably for some time upon his character; and in 1785 he removed to the gymnasium or college of Barby, with the view of being educated in theological learning for the ministry of the United Brethren. But here he soon became dissatisfied both with the scientific qualifications of his instructors, and with the doctrines of the Moravian confession; and all the efforts which his teachers made to remove his doubts and objections proving fruitless, it became necessary for him to remove from Barby, and to forego his design of becoming a Moravian pastor. This was a painful disappointment to his father, who dreaded for some time that his son would become an apostate from the faith. "O, my foolish son," he exclaimed, "who hath bewitched thee that thou shouldst not obey the truth?" and on his father's account, to whom he was warmly attached, the incident was a most distressing one to young Schleiermacher himself. The letters which passed between them at that time, are in the highest degree honourable to both father and son. Being still anxious to pursue the study of theology, he removed to the university of Halle, where he heard the prelections of Semler and others, and devoted much of his time to the study of philosophy in the writings of Wolf, Kant, and Jacobi. He was one of the poorest, as well as ablest students, of Halle. When his course of study was completed, his wardrobe was in such a condition that he could not present himself before the board of examination in Berlin till he got his empty purse replenished from home; and when his worthy father sent him twenty thalers to supply his wants, that modest sum made him feel so rich, that he remarked in a letter to a kind uncle with whom he had lived in Halle, that he did not know what to do with so much money. In 1790 he passed the examination preparatory to ordination, and distinguished himself so highly that Dr. Sack, the chief examiner, and one of the royal chaplains, sought a private interview with him, and promised to do his utmost to obtain for him an early appointment. It was by Sack's interest that he obtained in the same year a tutorship in the family of the Graf Dohna in Schlobitten in Prussia, a post in which he continued till the summer of 1793, when he returned to Berlin. He was for a short time a teacher in two of the schools there, and in 1794 and 1795 he acted as assistant preacher at Landsberg on the Warthe. In 1796 he was appointed preacher to the great hospital in Berlin called the Charity; and it was while occupying this position that he gave to the world his first important work, the "Reden über die Religion" (Discourses on Religion), which appeared in 1799, and immediately drew upon him the eyes of the highly educated portion of the community, to whom it was specially addressed. Designed to demonstrate by arguments of reason the necessity of religion for man, it was rather a treatise on the philosophy of religion than a theological work; and it was even at first mistaken by the author's kind friend. Dr. Sack, as a disguised pleading on the side of pantheistic views, such as had recently become current in writers of the romantic school. With many of these writers Schleiermacher had become personally familiar since his settlement in Berlin; with Frederick von Schlegel in particular he had lived on a footing of the closest intimacy; and Dr. Sack, who was aware of these connections, and had long seen them with uneasiness, was easily betrayed into the supposition that his friend had become tainted with the false principles of the literary and scientific circles in which he moved so freely, especially as some parts of the "Reden" had the appearance of looking that way. But the author assured him that he had entirely misunderstood the philosophical language which he had made use of; and that instead of corrupting religion with pantheistic metaphysics, his true aim and object had been to prove the independence of religion of all metaphysics whatever, and thus to rescue it from the storms of philosophical opinion which were then raging. It is admitted, however, on the other hand, even by Schleiermacher's warmest admirers, that his intimacy with Schlegel and others of the same school, was not unattended with disadvantage and danger to his moral tone and habit. They admit that the letters which he published in 1801 in Schlegel's Athenæum, in explanation and defence of that author's Lucinde, though admirably written, were at best a beautiful commentary on a bad text. It is also admitted that when he left Berlin in 1802, and removed to Stolpe in the capacity of a royal chaplain, this change of residence was of as great advantage to his subsequent moral and spiritual development, as his removal from Barby had been to his intellectual life. At Stolpe he remained for two years, during which he finished and brought out his elaborate "Kritik aller bisherigen Sittenlehre" (Critique of all past systems of Morals), the first of his works which had a strictly philosophical form; besides continuing to work hard upon a translation of Plato, which was to have been the joint production of Schlegel and himself, but which in the end, owing to his friend's hopeless habits of procrastination, fell entirely into his own hands. In 1804 he was invited to occupy a theological chair at Würzburg, and had resolved to accept it; but the king of Prussia withheld his permission, and bestowed on him instead a chair at Halle, to which he removed in the same year. He was appointed university preacher at the same time, and both his lectures and his sermons immediately excited in the students the warmest interest and enthusiasm. "I recollect very well," says Dr. Lücke, "how at that time some of my elder fellow-students returning from Halle spoke with enthusiastic praises of the new light that had arisen for them in the person of Schleiermacher." But so original and profound a thinker was not to be easily understood. By some he was mistaken for a Spinozist, and by others for a Pietist. The professors were as much divided about him as the students. Niemeyer and Vater stood by him, Knapp and Nösselt stood aloof. It was at this period he published his "Weihnachtsfeier" (Christmas: a Dialogue), and his treatise on the first epistle to Timothy; the latter being the first fruits of his studies in the department of scripture criticism and exegesis.

In 1807 the lectures of the university were interrupted and finally suspended by the French invasion, and Schleiermacher suffered not a little personal hardship at the hands of the plundering parties of the enemy who entered Halle. His purse was again almost empty, and his health suffered from the spare diet rendered necessary by the high price of provisions. But his lofty patriotic spirit refused to bow to the invader. He declined, when required to do so, to offer up public prayers for the new king and queen of Westphalia; and throwing up his academic offices, quitted Halle towards the end of the year for Berlin. Here he found employment for a time, partly in preaching and the delivery of theological and philosophical lectures, and partly in the execution of several political missions which he undertook in the interest of his oppressed king and country. But ere long a new and noble position was found for him, to compensate, and more than compensate, for what he had lost. In 1807 Frederick William of Prussia, in the midst of national disaster and humiliation, conceived the design of founding a university in Berlin, and Schleiermacher was one of the first men to be fixed upon to occupy a chair in the new institution. At once to stimulate and guide this important design, he published in 1808 his "Gelegentliche Gedanken über Universitatem im Deutschen Sinn" (Occasional thoughts on universities in the German sense). In the meanwhile he was appointed preacher in the church of the Trinity in Berlin, where his eloquence and originality attracted audiences from the highest and most lettered classes of that enlightened capital; and about the same time he entered into a marriage, which proved a very happy one, with Henriette von Mühlenfels, the young widow of one of his best-loved friends. Von Willich. At last in 1810 the university was opened, and Schleiermacher found himself at the head of one of the most brilliant theological faculties that Germany had ever produced, including Neander, De Wette, and Marheineke; and associated with such men in the other faculties as Fichte, Buttmann, Böckh, and Lachmann. It is generally admitted that