There is no self-knowledge but an historical one. No one knows what he himself is who does not know his fellow men, especially the most prominent one of the community, the master's master, the genius of the age.

At a later period he was councillor of legation in the Austrian embassy at the Frankfurt diet but in 1818 he returned to Vienna. Schlegel et la genie du romantisme allemand (1904); by the same Erläuterungen In F. Culture et traduction dans l'Allemagne romantique: Herder Goethe Schlegel Novalis Humboldt Schleiermacher Hölderlin.

With his older brother August Wilhelm Schlegel he was a critical leader of German Romanticism.