The New International Encyclopædia/Moritz, Karl Philipp

MORITZ, mō'rĭts, (1756-93). A German author, prominent in the Sturm-und-Drang period. He was born at Hameln, of poor parents. He taught for a short time at Dessau (1777), then at a military orphanage at Potsdam (1778), and soon after in Berlin. In 1786 he went to Italy, and in Rome became acquainted with Goethe, who reeommended him to Duke Karl August, by whose influence Moritz was elected to the Berlin Academy, and in 1789 became professor of antiquities in the Academy of Art in Berlin. His adventurous life can to a great degree be reconstructed from the semi-biographical novels, Anton Reiser (1785-90) and Andreas Hartknopf (1786). He wrote, besides: Versuch einer deutschen Prosodie (1780); Ueber die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen (1788); Götterlehre (1791); Reisen eines Deutschen in England (1783); and Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien (1792-93). Consult Dessoir, Moritz als Aesthetiker (Berlin, 1889).