Writer on art, economics, and sociology, was born in London, the son of a wealthy wine merchant, a Scotsman. Brought up under intellectually and morally bracing Puritan influences, his education was mainly private until he went to Oxford in 1836; he remained until 1840, when a serious illness interrupted his studies, and led to a six months’ visit to Italy. On his return in 1842 he took his degree. In 1840 he had made the acquaintance of Turner, and this, together with a visit to Venice, constituted a turning point in his life.
In 1843 appeared the first vol. of Modern Painters, the object of which was to insist upon the superiority in landscape of the ...

German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright. Schiller is considered by most Germans to be Germany's most important classical playwright. Critics like F.J. Lamport and Eric Auerbach have noted his innovative use of dramatic structure and his creation of new forms, such as the melodrama and the bourgeois tragedy.
During the last seventeen years of his life (1788–1805), Schiller struck up a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang Goethe, with whom he frequently discussed issues concerning aesthetics and encouraged Goethe to finish works he left merely as sketches; this relationship and these discussions ...