A. W. Schlegel in 1797 judged it to be a finished work of art in the grand style, and at the same time intelligible, sympathetic, patriotic, popular, a book full of golden teachings of wisdom and virtue.

In didactic poetry Lucretius was pre-eminent, and is regarded by Schlegel as the first of Roman poets in native genius.

It may be that it was from the Fichtean Idealismthat deeply ironical system, where the I is opposed to the notI and annihilates itthat the Romantic school took the doctrine of irony which the late Solger especially developed, and which the Schlegels at first regarded as the soul of art, but which they subsequently found to be fruitless and exchanged for the more positive axioms of the Theory of Identity of Schelling.

See too Schlegel on Dramatic Literature.

She has taken Schlegel with her from Berlin; they are together in Coppet; and will probably go to Italy toward winter.