  Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–1793) is the last of the pre-Kantian German aestheticians who will be considered here. Moritz was another of the many German intellectuals of the eighteenth century who rose to renown from unpromising beginnings. He was the son of an army musician who sought refuge from his own circumstances in Quietism, an extreme sect of Pietism, and inflicted its religiosity upon his son. After several years as an apprentice to a hatmaker, Moritz was able to attend grammar school.  He spent a few years at the universities in Erfurt and Wittenberg, interspersed with attempts to become an actor and a stay at the seminary of the Moravian Brothers, another Pietist sect. At twenty-two, he became a schoolteacher in Berlin. In 1782 he made a trip to England and published a travelogue which won him some recognition, after which he returned to his school until 1786, when his publisher financed a trip to Italy in the hope of getting another popular travelogue out of him. In Italy Moritz became a friend of Goethe, who would write a much more famous account of his Italian journey, and learned enough about classical art to become professor of aesthetics at the Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1789, the position he held until his death just four years later. Moritz’s publications during his brief but intense literary career included, in addition to his Italian travelogue, eventually published in 1792–3, the novels Anton Reiser (1786–90), a barely fictionalized autobiography, and Andreas Hartknopf: An Allegory; philological works including an Essay on German Prosody in 1786 and Lectures on Style in 1793; textbooks on grammar and logic for children, a German Grammar for the Ladies, English and Italian grammars for Germans, and an eventually very successful account of Greek mythology aimed at both children and adults; a Theory of Ornament; and a journal of “empirical psychology” (erfahrende Seelenkunde) that he edited for ten years. But what concern us here are the essays in aesthetics that Moritz published between 1785 and 1791.