Schlegel, FRIEDRICH VON, German critic and writer, was born at Hanover on 10th March 1772. After receiving a classical education at Göttingen and Leipzig, he took to his pen for a livelihood. He abducted the wife of the Jewish merchant Veit (a daughter of Moses Mendelssohn and mother of Veit the religious painter), thus putting into practice views as to free love which he had enounced in a notorious romance, Lucinde. He then joined his brother August Wilhelm at Jena, and along with him wrote and edited the journal Das Athenaeum, in which they laid down the characteristic principles or features of Romanticism. His zeal for these principles was so strong that he has ever been accounted the head of the Romantic School (q.v.). With him too Friedrich wrote Charakteristiken und Kritiken (1801), a set of longer critical essays, which gave a real stimulus to good work in German literature and contain some of both brothers' best writing. Friedrich Schlegel at length sought relief for his romantic yearnings, and refuge from the harsh realities of actual life, by becoming a faithful son of the Roman Catholic Church. From 1808 down to his death, which occurred during a lecture-tour at Dresden on 11th January 1829, he was employed in the public service of Austria. It was he who penned the proclamations of that empire against Napoleon in 1809. The best known of his books, at least in Britain, are lectures on the Philosophy of History, first delivered at Vienna in 1827 (Eng. trans. 1835), and History of Literature, delivered at Vienna in 1814 (Eng. trans. 1859); both are clever, but one-sided, the Roman Catholic tendencies of the writer being too strongly pronounced. There are also English versions of his Philosophy of Life (1847) and Lectures on Modern History (1849). The book the Germans esteem most highly of his is Ueber Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808), which was a pioneer for the study of Sanskrit in Europe. The best edition of his Sämtliche Werke is Feuchterleben's (15 vols. Vienna, 1846).
See his Briefe an A. W. Schlegel (1889); Haym, Die Romantische Schule (Berlin, 1869); and G. Brandes, Den Romantische Skole i Tydskland (Copenhagen, 1873).