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 On some academical experiences of tlie Ge 
 
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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924030561439 
 
ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES OF 
 THE GERMAN RENASCENCE. 
 
ON SOME 
 
 ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 . OF THE 
 
 GERMAN RENASCENCE. 
 
 AN ADDRESS INTEODUGTOET TO TEE SESSION 1878-9 
 OF THE OWENS COLLEGE, MANGHESTEE. 
 
 ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WAED, M.A., 
 
 PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND ENGLISH LITERATURE, OWENS COLLEGE ; 
 FELLOW OF rETERHOTJSE, CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY REaUEST OF THE COUNCIL. 
 
 UTonbirn'. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND 0. 
 
 MANCHESTER: J. E. CORNISH. 
 1878. 
 
 T/je Ilight of Trmisladnv mhl Beprouuc 1.1011 is EeservciJ 
 

 /f^r 
 
 LONDON : 
 K. fLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, 
 . BKIOAD STREET HILL. 
 
This Address, which lays no claim to any other 
 character, is printed as it was delivered, with the 
 addition of a few passages omitted in delivery 
 for want of time. I should like to be allowed 
 to add, that I sincerely dislike printing anything 
 without references to authorities ; but I do not 
 wish to lengthen these pages by citing the works 
 which I have -used in the present instance. 
 
 A. W. W. 
 
ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES OF 
 THE GERMAN RENASCENCE. 
 
 Among the many devices of the Eenascence age 
 there is one consisting of two words, engraved over a 
 scholar's door, which, though it seems to breathe the 
 atmosphere of a world where it is always Long Vaca- 
 tion, I may perhaps not inappropriately quote to you 
 to-day. Inscriptions, even when they are not epitaphs, 
 must not be read all too literally ; and there seems 
 something of irony in the contrast between sentiment 
 and experience, when one remembers the life of the 
 man who chose forhis motto, — I might almost say when 
 one remembers the fate of the house for which the motto 
 was chosen, — Beata ' tranquillitas ! Blessed is tran- 
 quillity. For in many ways this life was a far from 
 tranquU one, and the house which long sheltered it 
 was in the end sacked by that natural enemy of all 
 tranquillity — a mob with a cry. And if it is most 
 true, in the words which Landor puts into the mouth 
 of Machiavelli, that ' the sleeper is more tranquil than 
 the wide-awake, and the dead even than he ' — then the 
 tranquillity enjoyed within the walls which bore this 
 placid legend was something very different from the 
 repose of night and the stillness of the tomb. 
 
8 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPEBIENCES 
 
 For here dwelt one of the foremost representatives 
 in the Germany of the Eenascence and Eeformation 
 period of a band of men whose zeal and energy helped 
 to recast the intellectual life of their nation and age. 
 Here was the chosen meeting-place of a company of 
 scholars, eloquent with the part-recovered wealth of 
 classic speech, disdainful of the formulae and methods 
 which had sufficed for generations of their predecessors, 
 and ready to conspire, like Attic tyrannicides, with the 
 weapons of their invective wrapt in the evergreen of 
 the new old learning. Here Conrad Muth — better 
 known as Mutianus Eufus (though why Eufus, is one 
 of the buried secrets of Eenascence nomenclature), — 
 Canon of Gotha, the acknowledged father, and for a 
 time the leader, of the humanists of the University of 
 Erfurt ia Thuringia, spent much of his life among 
 books and manuscripts — treasures brought from beyond 
 the Alps, where in his youth he had associated with 
 Baptista Mantuanus and Picus of Mirandola, and now, 
 with a hospitality liberal of something more than 
 ' the frolic wine,' distributed by -him among his chosen 
 guests. Long and laboriously had he sought, and but 
 imperfectly was he destined to enjoy, what he pro- 
 claimed a scholar's truest blessing. After boyhood he 
 had passed through many years of what he calls lucu- 
 brations, exUes, peregrinations, and discomforts mani- 
 fold, sustained, for the love of letters. Trained together 
 with Erasmus in the famous school of Deventer, the 
 seminary of so much that is greatest and noblest in 
 the movement of the German Eenascence, he had, 
 like Erasmus and a thousand others, led a wandering 
 
OF THE GEEMAN EENASCENCB. 9 
 
 life, which had however at last brought him home to 
 the neighbourhood of his old Thuringian University. 
 Erfurt, of whose significance in German university 
 history I shall have more to say, was then in a tran- 
 sition stage. If the proverb still held good, according 
 to which ' he who wishes really to study goes to 
 Erfurt,' the direction of its studies themselves was 
 beginning to, change, and the times had not yet dis- 
 closed the meaning of another and more mysterious 
 proverb — ' Erforda Praga ' — Erfurt is Prague. For it 
 was Prague where Huss had taught and preached, 
 and whence he had gone forth to. trial and death. 
 
 After this, for a time the life of Mutianus becomes 
 more generally typical of many a scholar's experience. 
 When a firm footing seems to have been gained, and 
 the span of manhood's years seems to stretch out with 
 the promise of a long vista of usefulness, there enter 
 self-confidence and scorn of the pedants satisfied to 
 tread the accustomed paths ; and in the course of time 
 the field of congenial labour having been diligently 
 cultivated, there is something of a harvest reaped 
 and more of seed sown. But the reaction begins 
 almost with the fruition ; the world — even the little 
 World around us — while it moves, to be sure, will not 
 change all as the student wishes ; the current of the 
 Eenascence enters into the current of the Eeformation, 
 which he hesitates and then declines to join ; the 
 younger men and their aspirings begin to outrun 
 the desires of those who set their highest hopes upon 
 a future which, others than they are to control ; till at 
 last come the beginnings of repose, at the cost of 
 
10 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 estrangement from those who are unwilling or unable to 
 submit. And it is well if the multitude outside do 
 not take upon itself to fret and rage against a simple 
 and a useful life as against the superfluity of idleness, 
 as did the Gotha mob when, headed by fanatic preachers, 
 it plundered the house of Mutianus, with those of his 
 brother-canons, in the name of that Keformation for 
 which, askance though he looked upon its progress, he 
 too had helped to prepare the way. Doubts, difficulties, 
 and controversies — the lot of men to misunderstand 
 and be misunderstood — all these are not shut out by 
 the door of a student's library, any more than by the 
 planks of a ship or the portals of a palace ; it is only 
 in neatly constructed allegories that such a seclusion 
 really secludes. 
 
 And yet the motto of Mutianus has a very real 
 meaning, which may come home to us with special 
 force as we on this morning in our CoUege also stand 
 upon a threshold — ^the threshold of a new period of 
 academical study. The tranquillity to which our 
 typical Renascence scholar looked forward, and which 
 in some degree it was his to enjoy, was not the tran- 
 quillity of isolation — such as some men no doubt have 
 sought in colleges as well as in retreats sacred to 
 religious meditation alone. What he sought and ia 
 some measure found was the satisfaction of accom- 
 plishing, partly with others, partly through others, 
 his share of the intellectual task he saw opening before 
 his age. There is perhaps no class of men in review- 
 ing whose lives and labours we have the connected- 
 ness and continuity of all efiiective human efibrt more 
 
OP THE GEEMAN EENASCENCB. U 
 
 cheeringly brought home to us than the class to which 
 scholars and men of science belong ; and it is but 
 natural to seek in the records and reminiscences of in- 
 stitutions where such men have worked together under 
 common conditions and often with common ends for 
 evidence of the strength which lies in union. Nothing, 
 says Mutianus, is more beneficial to the scholar than 
 literary companionship ; and such companionship — 
 whether between teachers or learners, or in mingled 
 mutuality — is of the very essence of academical life. 
 Our modesty will prevent us from applying too speci- 
 fically the words of another and greater student, the 
 very flower of the academical aspect of the Eeforma- 
 tion, whose title of prceceptor Germanice fails to 
 measure the extent of his influence. ' There are,' 
 says Melanehthon, ' no more pleasant and no firmer 
 friendships than philosophic friendships. I mean those 
 of scholars contracted in the companionship of studies. 
 Not even the friendship of Leelius and Scipio would 
 have been so sweet had they been strangers to the 
 Muses.' And we may deem it to savour of over- 
 legislation when in several of the old college-statutes 
 at Oxford and Cambridge we find such desires ex- 
 pressed as this : ' That the fellows who are willing to 
 walk out should seek each other's society, and walk 
 together, conversing with each other in pairs on scholar- 
 ship or on some proper and pleasant topic, and so re- 
 turn betimes.' But though the gentle pressure inti- 
 mated in the one case may not invariably have pro- 
 duced the results extolled in the other, it seems but 
 little necessary to dwell on the truism that a common 
 
12 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPEEIBNCES 
 
 academical life is the very nurse and foster-mother of 
 individual intellectual effort. Assuredly, even in those 
 directions in which academical studies have pre-emi- 
 nently pointed, great things have been accomplished by 
 what is called self-help, if you like to give it that 
 vague name ; Erasmus himself indulged in the vanity 
 of calling himself an autodidact ; and few of us are 
 strangers to challenges pointed by such remarks as 
 this, that Gibbon's Decline and Fall is not due to 
 Oxford, or Grote's Greece to any university. Other 
 voices have been heard to proclaim the incontrovertible 
 fact that the achievements of genius are primarily as- 
 cribable to no methods of training, whether academical 
 or other. Quisnegavii f Who, even without examin- 
 ing how far even in such cases academical training- 
 may have indirectly contributed its influence, is in- 
 clined to deny the extraordinary and exceptional 
 phenomena of mental power, energy, and endurance ? 
 But who on the other hand that knows the uncertainty 
 and the unrest of solitary study, that has watched the 
 process by which a band of fellow- workers becomes (to 
 call it by the old name) a school of learning and re- 
 search, can doubt the beneficent influence of means 
 which, in one form or another, no epoch of civilisation 
 has been able to forego ? The Renascence age was in 
 its way singularly alive to the uses of associated 
 study ; and if I may speak of different times, I may 
 say in passing that there is no side of modern uni- 
 versity life _ better worth not only preserving, but 
 developing, than that of combination in study. Between 
 teachers and learners the laboratory and the seminary, 
 
OF THE GERMAN RENASCENCE. 13 
 
 among learners their own associations connected with 
 the studies of their academical life, are the real and 
 necessary supplements of the lecture-room. 
 
 But however and under whatever circumstances he 
 may carry on his labours, the tranquillity of the atmo- 
 sphere in which the student is to feel at home will 
 primarily depend on the end which he proposes to him- 
 self in them. For of course the real tranquilliser of the 
 mind is the sense of freedom, and it is this sense with 
 which every true scholar, every true man of science, 
 every true votary of the liberal arts, is privileged to 
 become endowed. Not to be gained at once, or gained 
 without toil, yet it is denied to none who are patient 
 and true, and who, however gladly they may welcome 
 the accidents of recognition of success, perhaps of 
 fame, refuse to see even in these the ends of their 
 lives and labours as students. Just as a well-organ- 
 ised system of university education should carefully 
 lead from a common basis of ' sound general training 
 to the several main branches of study, and in these 
 again leave room for the closer pursuit of special lines 
 of research, so the student who aims at much will, 
 without closing his eyes to the connexion of studies, 
 eschew discursiveness so far as possible in the conduct 
 of his own, until at last he has suited them to the 
 tastes and talents with which he is gifted and which 
 his opportunities have enabled him to cultivate. 
 When he has ascertained and tried these — a time 
 which comes sooner to some, later, but not the less 
 surely to others, and which it should be the object of 
 every well-devised academical system not to exclude 
 
14 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 from its possibilities — then, under whatever conditions 
 it may be his lot to prosecute his task, he may work 
 on to the end in tranquillity. For that freedom wUl 
 be his which belongs to harmony between the work 
 and the worker ; and whether ere his day closes he 
 has gathered in or but sown or merely turned the 
 sod, it is he of whom the poet's words are true, that 
 ' time is his inheritance, and time the field he tUls.' 
 
 It does not however escape me that to some of my 
 hearers such views may seem to soar inconveniently 
 out of distance from certain landmarks in the ordinary 
 course of a student's life, which perhaps even those of 
 you who are to-day beginning yours may not feel in- 
 clined to regard with absolute tranquillity of spirit. 
 The scholar whose device I borrowed was not himself 
 dumb on the subject of the value of academical 
 degrees; indeed, it so happens that two sayings of 
 his are preserved which represent the two extremes of 
 opinion on the matter. In his inmost soul Mutianus 
 cherished that lofty - contempt for mere ' brands ' 
 with which it is difficult altogether to disavow a 
 certain sympathy ; in fact, he anticipated the friendly 
 counsel which was, I remember, not long ago offered 
 to the authorities of our own College, recommending 
 them to set the example of a university unembarrassed 
 by such meaningless, or at all events fluid distinctions 
 as B.A., M.A., or D.D. ' Where Season presides,' he 
 remarked with much truth, ' there no Doctors are 
 requisite.' But he was at the same time shrewdly 
 alive to the possibility that (in the eyes of an un- 
 reasoning public) it would be a considerable advantage 
 
OF THE. GEEMAN RENASCENCE. 15 
 
 for his friends, the men of the New Learning, to bear 
 the , accustomed brand. ' I should strongly advise 
 you,' he writes, under a more worldly impulse, to his 
 friend Urbanus, 'to obtain the title of Master of 
 Arts, in order that under this mask terreas infantes 
 in tenebris — you may awe the babes in the dark.' 
 Perhaps the superstitious reverence for mere academi- 
 cal titles has not altogether vanished even in a dif- 
 ferent age and nation, although there are discrimi- 
 nating eyes enough wide open to use the light of 
 publicity around them. But in any case it would 
 be worse than idle to attempt to illustrate existing 
 systems of university graduation — such as those of 
 our own country at the present day — ^by any historical 
 pseudo-analogies. Opinions may differ as to what an 
 academical degree should imply — whether the mere 
 passing of an examijiation-test of knowledge acquired 
 and digested, of power trained and matured, even of 
 actual worth accomplished — or besides this, a fixed 
 period of residence at a recognised place of academi- 
 cal education, in which latter case it will additionally 
 indicate the certainty that its recipient has under- 
 gone, and the probability that he has benefited by, 
 the influences which, as I have said, are of the very 
 essence of academical life. Opinions may differ as to 
 the relations in which examination should- stand to 
 teaching, whether the latter should practically be 
 depressed into dependent preparation for the former, 
 or whether examination should be an accompaniment 
 and test of education, to the regulation of which the 
 conductors of that education should have something 
 
IC ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 to say. But there can be only one opinion as to the 
 principle that when a degree implies the passing of 
 an examination-test (and of those which signify less 
 than this I think it unnecessary to speak), then the 
 nature and conditions of that test should be (as 
 they are in all our national universities) open to 
 public ken and criticism ; and the administering 
 of that test should, where public policy deems it 
 desirable (as, in fact, it has in the case of some of 
 our universities) be partly in hands directly respon- 
 sible to the State. Under these circumstances, and 
 under this double guarantee, any national university 
 which should attempt to lower the existing level of 
 degrees, or to trifle with the proper bestowal of its 
 own, would condemn itself with an openness irrecon- 
 cUeable with the dictates of ordinary prudence — to 
 say nothing of ordinary public spirit. 
 
 From the student's point of view only a word need 
 be added. So long as he is possessed by the mere 
 sense that he is gradually compassing the quantum 
 sufficit for any degree or other examination, by the 
 mere consciousness that he is acquiring the power — ' 
 which men acquire, but with which machines are 
 born — of ' turning out ' a certain amount of results, 
 he has not yet crossed the inner threshold. The old 
 academical term of honours — distinctions which, as 
 you know, do not follow a man's name through life 
 like the B.A. and the M.A., which it would be worth 
 the Postmaster-General's while to prohibit on the 
 outside of letters — this term itself implies that only 
 he who does more than suffices is entitled to regard ; 
 
OF THE GEllMAN RENASCENCE. 17 
 
 and though it is the name of the Senior Wrangler 
 only which used to go forth to the world at the mid- 
 night hour, yet any effort which strives for more 
 than is necessary is the work of a true student's 
 spirit. Still nobler is the stimulus which impels him 
 to work on for the sake of the work itself, and for 
 the gratitude, nameless though it be, of all those 
 whom the progress of knowledge benefits. Our 
 degree-lists will not suffer if such are the motives of 
 our exertions ; — and so, though the mediaeval custom 
 has become unfamiliar to most modern Colleges, ac- 
 cording to which older and younger, masters, bachelors, 
 and scholars, dignified and undignified, sat in common 
 on the students' benches, we may all have our share 
 in the tranquillity which is alike removed from stag- 
 nation and from unrest. 
 
 The motto of Mutianus seemed to me naturally to 
 suggest a few reflexions which have only repeated 
 part of what, in one shape or another, must be in the 
 minds of many of us on an occasion like the present. 
 I had met with it in the course of some readings in a 
 chapter of university and general educational history, 
 which has long appeared to me to possess special 
 interest and significance. And this not only, or so 
 much, because the chapter I have in view belongs to 
 the history of a nation whose academical life has been 
 of signally great importance for its progress and des- 
 tinies, and to the history of an age among the most 
 prominent features of which the reform of existing 
 and the foundation of new universities hold a con- 
 
18 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 spicuous place. Nothing is at once easier and more 
 delusive tlian to find half-resemblances between the 
 tendencies and conditions of different ages and nations, 
 and I have always thought the drawing of so-called 
 historical parallels between ages, as between individual 
 personages in them, a peculiarly precarious kind of 
 intellectual exercise,. The statesman, though he both 
 uses and values the experience of the past, has to deal 
 not only with the needs but with the forces of the 
 present ; and whatever plans or schemes, for instance, 
 those who are interested in questions of university 
 policy in this country may have in view, it is the 
 conditions of our own age and nation by which their 
 issue will and must be determined. But it cannot be 
 idle for those who like ourselves live in a land of 
 intellectual activity, nowhere more marked than in 
 educational life and in the growing demands made 
 upon its means and opportunities, to note some of the 
 elements in the educational efforts of a kindred people 
 at a period when it was signally awakened to this 
 branch of its national duties, and to ask ourselves 
 whether in any of them we can recognise factors 
 indispensable to all true progress in this momentous 
 direction of national activity. 
 
 Without making any comparisons of which lack of 
 time would prevent me from stating the grounds, I 
 think it incontestable that nowhere in that wonderful 
 age which stands midway between two great divisions 
 of history, and shares so many of the characteristics of 
 both, was the movement we call the Eenascence in the 
 great majority of its phases at once so arduous and so 
 
OF THE GERMAN RENASCENCE. 19 
 
 serious, so elevated in the scope and so broadly- 
 popular in tlie range of its endeavours, as in Germany. 
 Much — ^in some respects singularly much — had to be 
 done here ; and not the least in the enlarging and ex- 
 tending of the opportunities of academical study and 
 training which Germany had been late among the 
 nations of the West in offering to her sons. Of them, 
 too, some of the most illustrious in learning and in 
 letters had sat on the benches or filled the chairs of 
 the greatest of the mediaeval universities, the Univer- 
 sity of Paris ; whose long- enduring attractiveness to 
 Germans is attested by a list full of illustrious names, 
 from Albertus Magnus downwards, including a poet 
 such as Walther von der Vogelweide, a preacher such 
 as Geiler von Kaisersberg, with not a few of the men 
 whom we Protestants are apt rather unceremoniously 
 to claim as precursors of the Eeformation, and not 
 altogether ending even with the two eyes of 
 Germany, Erasmus, and Eeuchlin. But, though un- 
 doubtedly Paris had, as at all times, owed something 
 of her power of attracting foreigners to the foreigners 
 themselves, no German rival had, like our English 
 Oxford, at any time wrested from that university 
 the leadership in philosophic thought and teaching. 
 The remoteness of the seats of the earliest univer- 
 sities in the empire (Prague had been founded in 
 1347, and Vienna in 1365) must in any case have 
 prevented them from becoming real rivals to the 
 great place of learning in the West. Even after 
 universities had begun to be established on or near 
 the Ehine (Heidelberg, 1386, Cologne two years later), 
 
 B 2 
 
20 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 and further inland (Erfurt, 1392, Leipzig in con- 
 sequence of the emigration of the German students 
 and professors from Prague, 1409, Kostock a northern 
 colony of Erfurt, 1419), the so-called " German 
 nation " first makes its appearance as one of the great 
 divisions of the University of Paris, and after the 
 English wars the name supersedes that of the 
 " English nation " there. But the academical ascend- 
 ency of Paris declined and fell with the progress of 
 the struggle against the dominion of the scholastic 
 theology and philosophy of which she had been the 
 great exponent and representative ; while the policy 
 of the Popes was willing enough to let her suffer for 
 the prominent part she had played in upholding the 
 supremacy of the General Councils. Thus continued 
 the decentralisation (if I may rather loosely call it 
 so) of university education which both in and out- 
 side France the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were 
 to carry to so extraordinary a length. It was in the 
 midst, and largely with the aid, of these changes that 
 Germany entered into the full current of her share in 
 the Eenascence movement. In the latter half of the 
 fifteenth century, and the first few years of the six- 
 teenth, not less than nine new German universities 
 were added to the seven already in existence. 
 Pomeranian Greifswalde (1456) takes the lead; in 
 1460 followed the farnous foundation of Pope Pius 
 II., assuredly one of the most intelligent and politic 
 of all the Roman Pontiffs, the University of Basel. 
 The terms of its foundation indeed remain to exem- 
 plify that power of appealing to the popular, one might 
 
OF THE GERMAN EENASCENCB. 21 
 
 almost say to the democratic, spirit which in its 
 happiest hours the Papacy has so well understood 
 how to wield. But universities are not bulwarks 
 against the movements of history, though Popes 
 may build them up ; and one cannot help thinking of 
 another Pope, honest of purpose as he was humble 
 of spirit (Adrian VI.) requesting a few generations later 
 the glory of Basel — to Erasmus himself — to defend 
 the cause of the Church, and of the cold reception given 
 to the professoriaU-y voluble counsel. In the same year, 
 1460, was founded the University of Freiburg, one of 
 the twin creation of a noble-minded woman, Mech- 
 thildis, Archduchess of Austria, who induced her 
 husband to establish this university, as she afterwards 
 induced her son, Duke Eberhard of Wiirtemberg, 
 to establish the University of Tubingen — the Lady 
 Margaret of German University history. Of Frei- 
 burg, too, as of Basel, we can hardly think without 
 remembering Erasmus who in this ' most delectable 
 seat of the Muses,' was to spend the much-honoured 
 if not untroubled evening of his life ; but its earlier 
 days connect themselves rather with the name of a great 
 jurist, Zasius, whose "angelical" lectures (for so one 
 of his students describes them, though he was a 
 lawyer) early raised the reputation of his University. 
 Next came — both in 1472 — the Universities of Ingol- 
 stadt and Treves. Ingolstadt was always to be cele- 
 brated for a theological orthodoxy, driven in later 
 days into transnormal courses by the energy of the 
 Jesuits, and in this earlier period it boasted teachers 
 such as Eck, generally remembered only as Luther's 
 
22 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 successful (for the future of the Church of Eome, too 
 successful) antagonistic at the Leipzig disputation, but 
 in fact one of the most brilliant and, in some respects, 
 open-minded teachers of his age. In 1477 followed 
 Eeuchlin's University of Ttibingen, since the cele- 
 bration of whose four-hundredth birthday the other 
 day such a flood of academical tributes to its past 
 has poured in upon those interested in such matters, 
 and Mayence, whose fate it has not been to live so 
 long. In the early years of the sixteenth century 
 Wittenberg, the creation of the Elector of Saxony 
 (1502), and Frankfort-on-the-Oder, that of the Elector 
 of Brandenburg (1506), who had come to the con- 
 clusion that it was well for him also to do some- 
 thing for his neglected corner of the Empire, were 
 added to the list. 
 
 Of the numbers of the students in this period we 
 have no satisfactory statistics ; but when we hear of 
 several of the universities usually admitting from 
 300 to 400 students, of Cologne towards the close 
 of the century numbering, at one time, about 2,000, 
 and Vienna either 5,000 or 7,000 students, and when 
 we find the numbers of the teachers in liberal 
 correspondence, we understand how large a current 
 of the youthful life of the nation was now passing 
 through its rapidly-increasing places of academical 
 learning. 
 
 No mistake, I need hardly say, could be greater 
 than to suppose that in the generality of these 
 foundations, whether of a relatively earlier or later 
 date, the moving spirit was one of innovation. The 
 
OF THE GERMAN RENASCENCE. 23 
 
 conservatism of academical bodies is an old topic of 
 remark, and a hackneyed theme of satire. But 
 though this spirit of conservatism is in academical 
 as well as in other spheres of life peculiarly prone to 
 assume grotesque shapes, more especiall^-when it 
 finds itself in the extremes of recalcitrance, and the 
 king must " to Oxford send a troop of horse," yet its 
 real significance in each case depends upon the 
 elements which compose it. Every one knows that 
 in the Middle Ages not only were science and educa- 
 tion almost exclusively in the hands of the clergy ; 
 but that to the Church the universities owed much of 
 their wealth and the highest of the privileges on 
 which their power and influence were based. Thus 
 the Papal sanction had come to be held indispensable 
 to the establishment of a new university ; and in 
 the latter half of the fifteenth century it was specially 
 the policy of Eome to strengthen her hold upon 
 academical education, where possible, by new founda- 
 tions on the ancient lines. Of the seven universities 
 created in Germany before the year 1456 all, of the 
 nine established in the ensuing half-century all hut 
 one, had received their charters of foundation from 
 the Popes. (The exception, to be sure, was a momentous 
 one — ^Wittenberg. ) Doubtless there was som e measure 
 of calculation in this (and the loyalty of the members of 
 the universities to the Church was occasionally secured 
 in sufiiciently explicit forms — thus at Ingolstadt, a 
 student taking his degree directly swore allegiance to 
 St. Peter, the Church of Eome, and the existing Pope 
 his lord). The chapters and monasteries often exerted 
 
2i ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPEEIENCES 
 
 themselves so far as in them lay to flood the matricu- 
 lation lists of the universities with members or de- 
 pendents of their own bodies. Nearly everywhere 
 the theological faculty held a privileged position ; 
 nearly everywhere the chancellorship was held by eccle- 
 siastics, here and there none but they were admissible 
 to the rectorship. And if thus the old studies were 
 placed in a position of advantage against the coming 
 rivalry of the new, the conservatism of the univer- 
 sities was at the same time largely, and not in all re- 
 spects beneficially, fostered by collegiate and bursarial 
 foundations which often proved specially unwilling to 
 adapt themselves to the changes required from time 
 to time in all systems of academical education. 
 
 The drawbacks involved in this historical relation- 
 ship it seems to us easy enough to discern ; and 
 sympathise as we naturally may with much in the 
 currents of Eenascence and Eeformation which seemed 
 alike at first destined to break themselves against the 
 • opposition offered by many of these universities, we 
 may for a moment feel inclined to ask whether it was 
 not rather in spite of them than with their aid that 
 these currents flowed onward. But we' are apt to 
 forget not only how much* was accomplished even in 
 the earlier part of this period, however gradually; 
 but that . the universities would not have been in 
 harmony with the best efforts of their age and nation, 
 had they not represented the endeavour to maintain 
 unbroken the connexion imposed upon them by their 
 historical orign. 
 
 I think it idle to deny that during this period, in 
 
OP THE GEEMAN RENASCENCE. 25 
 
 Germany as in England, the framework of the Church 
 was still regarded by the consent of all who, in labour- 
 ing for the intellectual, laboured at the same time for 
 the moral progress of the people as necessary, as in- 
 dispensable to the social edifice, — just as in Germany 
 the framework of the Empire was still, and more 
 enthusiastically, perhaps, than ever, regarded by pa- 
 triotic minds as bound up with the greatness and 
 welfare of the nation. It was the age in which, after 
 the hopeful era of the great Councils had passed away, 
 the attempt was made (and nowhere more eagerly and 
 laboriously than in Germany) to revive the life of the 
 Church by quickening the religious spirit of the 
 people, and bringing all learning and education into 
 harmony with, and to the aid of, these aspirations. 
 Let us not refuse to recognise what all historical evi- 
 dence seems to agree in attesting. Germany (I do 
 not say alone, but more distinctly perhaps than any 
 other country) was essaying the great experiment of 
 a reform of the Church from within, and her noblest 
 minds clung with pathetic hopefulness to what seemed 
 to them a still possible task. Wherever one turns 
 among the representative men of the earlier period 
 of the German Eenascence, one finds them basing 
 their educational efforts on the same principle. It 
 was the principle of that golden network of schools 
 which had spread through the empire from the first 
 foundations of the Confraternity of the Common Life, 
 established by Gerard Groote in the Netherlands, to 
 whose connexion with the greatest names of later 
 mysticism I need but advert. It was the principle 
 
26 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 of the life and labours of Nicolas Cusanus — Nicolas 
 of Cues on the Moselle — ^whose career is one sus- 
 tained endeavour in the combined causes of religious 
 revival and educational reform, whose reorganising 
 activity shrank not from the conception of reforming 
 the Papal Curia itself, and whose open mind wel- 
 comed and fostered the classical studies for which he 
 brought materials from the shores of the Bosporus, 
 and anticipated part of the greatest discovery of 
 rnodern astronomical science. Cusanus was a prince 
 of the Church ; >but the same principle is to be found 
 pervading the ejfforts of men of learning and education 
 pure and simple. One of these was Agricola, whose 
 stainless name dignifies the long and mingled roll of the 
 wandering scholars of this restless century, who hoped 
 that Germany might become more Latin than Latium, 
 and whose scholarship drew from Erasmus expressions 
 little short of adoration. Others were Agricola's friend 
 and pupil, Hegius, the simple schoolmaster to whom 
 German classical scholarship may be said to owe its 
 foundation, which he first laid by establishing it as the 
 central subject of school training ; and Wimpheling, 
 the author of the first methodical expositions of na- 
 tional education, the pride of that seminary of sound 
 learning, Alsatian Schlettstadt. All these, whose names 
 I choose merely as the most representative, were at 
 one with regard to the great aim of their endeavours. 
 But not only the names of men or of women — for the 
 German Eenascence too has its heroines, like the 
 Italian, and none of them recalls a more beautiful 
 type of gentle culture and heroic endurance than 
 
OF THE GEEMAN EENASCENCE. 27 
 
 that of Charitas Pirkheimer, the abbess of the Clares 
 of Niirnberg — bear testimony to this endeavour at 
 combining new and old ; whole cities may be said 
 to have built up their educational life on this basis 
 of pietas Utterata, as it was afterwards called by 
 John Sturm of Strassburg, who in later days pre- 
 served not a little of this earlier character of the 
 German Renascence. 
 
 We know how fitful and how imperfect was the 
 support given to this great conservative revival in 
 the quarter whence support in the shape of reform 
 would have most effectively come. We know that 
 the ignorance and corruption which operated in a 
 contrary direction were deep and widespread, al- 
 though we do not believe every word that Erasmus 
 says against the monks. And we understand why at 
 the universities and schools much in the old studies 
 could not be in substance saved by engrafting upon 
 them the new ; for in educational life, too, there are 
 periods when the physician must make room for the 
 surgeon ; and even the words of Erasmus seem to 
 fall short of the necessities of the case when he pro- 
 tests of the " good " or new learning, — that " not for 
 this purpose was it introduced into the schools to 
 drive out the old learning, but that the latter might 
 be pursued with more purity and method." For much 
 in the old methods, and for many of the old teachers, 
 the day of compromise was passing away. It was 
 necessary that learning and education should not be 
 separated from theix connexion with, but taken out 
 of the absolute control of, the clergy, and that the 
 
28 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 laity should learn to concern themselves with these 
 matters, just as in the same age they were beginning 
 to understand that the management of the poor and 
 the conduct of charity were affairs with which, in 
 their civic communities, they had a direct concern. 
 And of the old methods much was to be thrust aside 
 for ever. From the most elementary to the most 
 honoured of studies all were to be benefited by the 
 change. Students were to forget the Donatus of the 
 Doctrinale in order to learn Latin grammar itself 
 (whether or not in expectation of the golden age 
 when, in the opinion of the excellent Dean Colet, 
 languages might be learnt without any grammar at 
 all) ; they were to compass the act of declining sub- 
 stantives without confounding their wits over the 
 question whether the vocative is a case or not ; and 
 they were to read the Socratic dialogues of Plato 
 in lieu of disputing whether, supposing Plato said, 
 " Sortes^ shall be cursed, if he has cursed me," and 
 Sortes said, " Plato shall be cursed, if he has not 
 cursed me," — whether in this case Plato has cursed 
 Sortes or not. And if classical learning was to be 
 established as the basis of higher education, and to 
 remain respected as such by both Protestant and 
 Catholic teachers — till future ages were on it to find 
 a footing from which to strive onwards, in the mean- 
 while no science was to benefit more from both the 
 method and the substance of the new studies than 
 theology, destined so soon again to absorb the chief 
 part of the academical activity of the nation. 
 ' A scholastic abbreviation for Socrates. 
 
OF THE GERMAN EENASCENCE. 29 
 
 These changes, then, or rather the changes of which 
 these are mere suggestions, the conservatism of edu- 
 cational life was not to prevent, and its unworthier 
 elements, sluggishness, prejudice, force of habit, 
 were to collapse in their endeavour permanently to 
 prevent them. But the real service of that union 
 between religious and educational ideas which the 
 nobler part of the conservatism of this period had 
 in view was this — that it prevented the whole educa- 
 tional system of which the universities formed part 
 from breaking into fragments ; and that in an age 
 when the pursuit of knowledge was doubly seductive 
 by the novelty and the brilliancy of the paths it 
 opened, this pursuit was largely if not altogether pre- 
 served from the danger of being carried on without 
 reference to its educational ends. German humanism, 
 in individual cases perhaps, but , never as a ^ whole 
 movement, lost its balance or ended in a slough of 
 despond — yes, a slough o£ despond — like its Italian 
 contemporary; and Germany may be held fortunate 
 in that her educational life in this period was not 
 estranged from the highest ideals of life which the 
 age and the nation possessed. It is surely unnecessary 
 to add that each age must reckon with its own 
 conditions and its own means ; and of all situations 
 in the world's history there is none more unique than 
 that which precedes the great disruption of the Church 
 of the West— none of which, so far as we can discern 
 the conditions, have more absolutely passed away. 
 
 There is a second feature in the German university 
 life of this period which connects itself in some 
 
30 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 measure with that already adverted to. You know 
 how cosmopolitan was the university life of the 
 Middle Ages ; and even in this period, when Italy 
 still seemed the promised land of scholarly research 
 and culture, and when Ulrich von Hutten could taunt 
 his countrymen with being regarded at Eome as 
 born to be drawers of water and grooms of horses, 
 the German universities were largely frequented by 
 foreign students. Thus, to take two examples from 
 the north and the south of the empire respectively, 
 the University of Eostock on the Baltic shores, even 
 after the foundation early in the last quarter of the 
 century of the Universities of Upsala and Copenhagen, 
 was regarded as the natural resort of Scandinavian 
 students.^ Ingolstadt (the University of Eck and 
 of Conrad Celtes, the first crowned "poet" among 
 the German humanists, who visited every German 
 university in turn, and to whom one of the most 
 ancient and important among them, Vienna, owed 
 its transformation in this period) attracted to 
 its lecture-rooms Italians and Spaniards, French- 
 men and Englishmen, Hungarians and Poles. But 
 
 ^ I do not know, by the by, whether to this is to be attributed 
 the extremely high spirit of the Rostockians as recorded by one 
 of the contributors to the Upistolce Ohscwrormn Virorwm, who re- 
 ports from that seat of learning : — Bostockienses sunt magni 
 inimici Parrhisieniiim, the Eostockians are great enemies of the 
 Parisians, qma Farrhisienses habent umi/m statutwm, because the 
 Parisians have a statute, quod non aceipiunt ad facultatem, sua/m 
 magistros Eostockienses, that they will not admit to their faculty 
 at Paris, masters of arts of Rostock. M sic Bostockienses etiam 
 non accipiiimt Farrhisienses, and so in return the Rostockians do 
 not admit the Parisians. 
 
OF THE GERMAN RENASCENCE. 31 
 
 notwithstanding this circumstance, and the fact that 
 many of the universities as the creations of particular 
 princes (such as Heidelberg, Freiburg, Tubingen, 
 and the electoral Universities of Wittenberg and 
 Frankfort-OD-Oder) were specially connected with 
 special parts of the Empire — ^there is a broadly 
 patriotic character in much of the academical life 
 and labours of this age. We are accustomed to 
 regard humanism or humanity as primarily identical 
 with the cultivation of the ancient classical tongues ; 
 we readily remember the pride with which the author 
 of the Colloquia proclaimed his ignorance of any 
 modern tongue that could be of vulgar use to him, 
 and the scorn with which professors and poets in 
 general looked down upon the barbarous speech in 
 which it was ■ unfortunately necessary for them to 
 talk to their households and the outer world. 
 
 ' Our Grekis theyr Greke so -well have applyed, 
 That they cannot say in Greke, rydynge by the way : 
 How, hosteler, fetche my hors a botell of ha,y ! ' 
 
 Thus we often forget the services which the New 
 Learning, in the hands of some of the most thought- 
 ful, if the more modest, of its votaries, rendered 
 to those studies from which patriotism has always 
 drawn its directest inspirations. Among these the 
 study of national history was, in England less, in 
 Germany more, immediately vitalised by, if it may 
 not be said to have actually begun with, the 
 Renascence. More particularly in that fertile and 
 noble borderland, which whether its eyes have been 
 
32 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 turned eastward or westward has ever poured into 
 the lap of the country to which its fortunes have 
 been attached a prodigal wealth of intellectual effort 
 — more particularly in Alsace, Grerman history now 
 began to be written with a special view to the 
 training and encouragement of the young, at all 
 times the heirs of the national future. Strassburg 
 was not indeed then a university in name ; it had 
 not become such even after John Sturm had com- 
 pleted the organisation of its educational institutions, 
 — but it had long been a centre of the highest intel- 
 lectual life of the nation, a place, if any, where the 
 love of learning had associated itself with patriotic 
 sentiment and inspiring religioiis thought. Here 
 where the traditions of the great mystics had 
 culminated in Johannes Tauler's life-long devotion to 
 his task of raising and purifying the people; here 
 where the " trumpet of Strassburg," the voice of the 
 great preacher Geiler von Kaisersberg, had so long 
 sounded in the ears of his generation ; and where 
 the grim and sober, but uncommonly real and direct, 
 satire of Sebastian Brant — the Ship of Fools — had 
 supplied the pulpit of his friend with a novel series 
 of texts ; here had come into honour with the German 
 tongue the pursuit and study of the national history. 
 Brant was a historian by profession and inclina- 
 tion ; while it was Geiler who led Wimpheling to 
 begin the historical labours which rose to the first 
 attempt by a humanist at a general German history. 
 Following these in Strassburg, Johannes Sleidanus 
 (of Schleiden in the Eifel), as the acknowledged 
 
OP TUB GBEMAN EENASCBNCE. 33 
 
 chief and long sole authority for the history of 
 the contemporary Reformation age, and in the neigh- 
 bouring Schlettstadt the famous Beatus Ehenanus, 
 a really critical and candid as well as patriotic 
 historian, handed down across intervening genera- 
 tions the study in which the learning and labours of 
 German scholarship have in later times gained some 
 of their most enduring laurels. The study of history 
 was no stranger to the German Universities and the 
 Renascence ; at Tubingen, for instance, the historian 
 Nauclerus was probably the most distinguished, 
 certainly the most influential, among the earlier 
 teachers there. 
 
 To Sebastian Brant (who wrote a life of the 
 Emperor Titus with the sole object of bringing out 
 the comparison) the reigning Emperor Maximilian 
 was the delicicB generis humaiii; but there is the 
 spirit of a free citizen is his flattery. These educa- 
 tional influences helped to produce the national en- 
 thusiasm which pervades the political life of Germany 
 in the reign of Maximilian — -a prince whose career 
 and character are not above criticism, but who was 
 as typical of national ideals to many of the best 
 of his contemporaries and subjects as was our Queen 
 Elizabeth of at least equally chequered memory to 
 hers. For this national spirit, after it had proved 
 impossible to unite it with the current of the Re- 
 formation, the disintegrating consequences of the 
 Reformation itself, which the organism of the empire 
 was too impotent to absorb and too rotten to with- 
 stand, proved too strong ; and the Universities 
 
34 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 followed tlie tendencies and destinies of the particular 
 states to which they beloDged. It is not absolutely 
 impossible that they might have more persistently 
 continued to represent such national aspirations as 
 survived had they from the first been more frequently 
 established in the great seats of free civic life, instead 
 of being so largely dependent upon princes, secular or 
 ecclesiastical ; if for instance the wish which arose 
 once in the fourteenth and once again in the sixteenth 
 century to establish a university in the imperial city of 
 Frankfort-on-the-Main had been carried into execution, 
 the result must have proved a peculiarly interesting 
 experiment. But, even so, the academical Renascence 
 in Germany, before the fiery days when Ulrich von 
 Hutten sought with its aid in the first instance to 
 stir the patriotic passions of the land, contributed to 
 foster and sustain its public spirit, and thus fulfilled 
 a function which is among the most important of the 
 indirect influences of academical life. Not only by 
 the aid of those studies which directly concern them- 
 selves with the national past, or of those which 
 variously help to make men active and useful citizens, 
 but by helping to determine the tone and temper, 
 so to speak, of a nation's youth, have universities 
 in many ages and in many nations contributed to 
 foster that public spirit which is the salt of the 
 life of a community and of the nation. Of all 
 phUistinisms the most pitiable is that of a cultivated 
 — often painfully cultivated — indifference to the 
 duties which are not the prerogative of the better 
 trained, but which the better trained should be among 
 
OF THE GERMAN RENASCENCE. 35 
 
 tHe best qualified to perform. If there is one weak- 
 ness whicli academical life should be capable of 
 eradicating from its midst, it is the weakness of 
 pococuranti, the characterlessness of whose careers 
 has been so well described by the pleasantest of 
 our Augustan poets : 
 
 ' Without love, hatred, joy, or fear. 
 They led a kind of — as it were ; 
 Nor wish'd nor cared, nor laughed nor cried, 
 And so they lived and so they died.' 
 
 What I said just now as to historical learning 
 illustrates the fact that it was not only the study of 
 the ancient classics (whether as to form or as to both 
 form and subject) which profited from the influence 
 of the Renascence movement upon German acade- 
 mical life. The comprehensiveness of the range of uni- 
 versity studies in this period is indeed not a feature 
 likely to appear to the generality of modern students 
 so noteworthy as perhaps it is ; and, as a matter 
 of course, there was about this comprehensiveness 
 much that was merely tentative. If, however, we 
 take an example, we may be better able to estimate 
 the widely and multifariously reinvigorating nature 
 of the changes often summarised under the name of 
 humanistic reform. The University of Vienna, whose 
 institutions had been largely copied by the new foun- 
 dations (Freiburg for instance), had sunk into evident 
 decay in the later years of the long and inglorious 
 reign of the Emperor Frederick III. But with the 
 accession of Maximilian active measures- of reform 
 began. Not only was special encouragement here given 
 
 C 2 
 
36 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 to the realia, as they were more or less loosely 
 called, viz., mathematics, astronomy, and physics ; not 
 only was the flower of the more aspiring students 
 brought together in the curiously duplicate coZZe^'wm 
 poetarum et mafhematicorum — a seminary, as one 
 might be tempted to call it, of classical and mathe- 
 matical honour men ; but the spirit of which humanism 
 was the representative influenced almost all the prin- 
 cipal branches of university studies. There was no 
 doubt a danger lest the assiduous cultivation of the 
 classical languages might run into a sheer devotion 
 to form ; and that generations might pipe away 
 laborious days as Latin versifiers. But this danger 
 was lessened by the attention simultaneously paid to 
 the geographical and historical disciplines ; and while 
 the scholastic methods were banished from gramma- 
 tical and philosophical instruction, a fuller sense was 
 also awakened of the importance of physical and 
 mathematical studies. By strengthening the study ot 
 the Eoman law, humanism here (as it afterwards did 
 in so marked a degree in France) helped to draw 
 closer the connexion between the university and the 
 public life of the State, though (as some of my hearers 
 are aware), with results of doubtful advantage for the 
 continuity of the national life ; while the advance of 
 biological studies conferred indisputable benefit upon 
 the labours of that faculty which in after times was 
 to contribute so signally to the academical reputation 
 of Vienna — the faculty of medicine. 
 
 It would not be difficult, I suppose, to parallel the 
 results of the new movement from the history of other 
 
OF THE GERMAN EBNASCENCE. 37 
 
 contemporary German universities, though nowhere 
 can they have become more rapidly perceptible than 
 at Vienna. Thus at the close of this period when, 
 owing to the absorbing interests of the times, con- 
 troversial theology was to occupy the best academical 
 forces of the nation, we find Melanchthon, whose 
 generous and widely-cultivated mind could not be 
 absorbed by the claims of any single science, expound- 
 ing his conceptions of the range of the higher studies 
 with a truly generous breadth. He speaks, no doubt, 
 as a theologian whose cardinal maxim it is that an 
 unlearned theology is an Iliad of evils, and who 
 desires that this science may be nourished by all the 
 rest. But with how catholic a sympathy he urges 
 the uses of grammar, of dialectics, of moral and 
 physical science, and pleads for a philosophic study of 
 medicine and jurisprudence ! To me almost every 
 utterance of that generous mind seems to breathe 
 the spirit of true piety ; yet how vast a step forward 
 has been made by him from the earlier mediaeval 
 conceptions of the uses of learning, like that of 
 Ehabanus Maurus, for instance, who held that ' rhe- 
 toric ought to be studied in order that we may under- 
 stand the figurative expressions of Holy Writ ; poetry, 
 so that we may ascertain the right rhythm of the 
 psalms ; dialectics, so that we may confute the false 
 conclusions of heretics ; arithmetic, so that we may 
 decipher the mystic numbers of Scripture ; geometry, 
 so that we may arrive at correct conceptions of the 
 sacred edifices ; astronomy, so that we may fix aright 
 the holidays of the Church.' Still, the comprehen- 
 
38 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 siveness of a university system must always be rela- 
 tive ; and nothing would be easier than to show how 
 far a Renascence age fell short even of a modest ideal 
 in this direction, while much that it had gained was 
 gained only for a time. But, on the whole, the uni- 
 versities of which I am speaking exhibit a cautious 
 and rational progress in the direction of extension 
 of studies, if the limited range of the subjects (espe- 
 cially the scientific) open to their age be taken into 
 account. It is noteworthy that the number of teachers 
 was even in this period extremely large ; and there 
 is evidence that a great deal of power was wasted by 
 simultaneous lecturing on the same subjects in the 
 same university. 
 
 But far more striking beyond doubt than the com- 
 prehensiveness of range which I cannot, speaking rela- 
 tively, regard as whoUy absent from the academical 
 systems of this period, is the thoroughness of which 
 humanism proper set the example in its own special 
 field. Thoroughness — ^the great aim of the true, the 
 bugbear of the sham student — of the boy who wishes 
 somehow to say his lesson, of the youth who wishes 
 somehow to pass his examination, of the man who 
 wishes somehow to make his speech or bring out his 
 book ! Melanchthon, when touching on the repre- 
 hensible want of ardour and constancy as learners of 
 the academical youth of his day, relates how the 
 eminent mathematician Johannes Stoefflerus was wont 
 to say that if he could infuse the whole of the 
 mathematics into a single draught, and brew them 
 into a gruel of the more liquid sort, he doubted 
 
OF THE GERMAN EENASCENCE. 39 
 
 whether he should be able to induce his students to 
 come often enough and stay long enough for him to 
 pour the entire decoction though a funnel down 
 their throats. The classical scholars of the Eenascence 
 set the example of a thirst for knowledge and culture 
 of a particular kind, which may justly be described 
 as a desire for thoroughness, and which, as such, 
 marks them as true students, and has rendered their 
 fraternity for ever memorable in the annals of learn- 
 ing. Their contemptuous disregard for other men and 
 other ways, their self-conceit and their want of mea- 
 sure in their admiration for their own leaders, are 
 on the other hand characteristics savouring of pe- 
 dantry ; and it is not wonderful that even in Ger- 
 many the movement should, during the brief period 
 of its ascendancy, have contrived in some ways to 
 outlive itself. 
 
 It is to the later part of the period of which I 
 am speaking that the most typical academical repre- 
 sentatives of this body of men belong. Keuchlin, the 
 man of the three tongues (Latin, Greek, and Hebrew), 
 but something besides a linguistic scholar, and 
 his cause were to furnish them with a war-cry ; 
 Erasmus, cosmopolitan in his wanderings as in his 
 fame, was rather their glorious distant luminary 
 ■ than the standard-bearer of their actual struggles for 
 ascendancy. Of the most ardent and advanced group 
 among the later body of humanists, one German uni- 
 versity, to which 1 have already referred at the outset 
 of these observations, became the chosen home. The 
 history of the University of Erfurt, which Kamp- 
 
40 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 schulte has written in a masterly monograph, centres 
 in the endeavours of Mutianus and his disciples, as 
 they took pride in calling themselves, to make the 
 Thuringian seat of learning the representative semi- 
 nary of the humanistic studies. Already Maternus, 
 the ' leading spirit of the preceding period in the 
 history of the university, had raised it to a promi- 
 nent position among those which readily opened 
 their doors to the new learning without entering 
 into any internecine conflict with the traditions of 
 the old studies. Kindred spirits had been associated 
 with him ; but already under his regime the younger 
 and less compromising adherents of the new studies, 
 the ' poets,' as. they loved to be called, had begun to 
 form themselves into a distinct school or party. Under 
 the leadership of Mutianus, this fraternity soon as- 
 sumed the attitude of open hostility towards the 
 ' sophists,' as they contemptuously called their oppo- 
 nents, little thinking that the day was to come when 
 they in their turn were to be decried under the 
 same opprobriously-intended name. 
 
 They survived the troublous days of a civic revo- 
 lution which annihilated half the treasures of the uni- 
 versity, but by specially impoverishing its endowed 
 foundations, facilitated the placing of its life and 
 studies on a new and wider basis. It was now, in 
 the second decennium of the tenth century, that the 
 fraternity of the humanists at Erfurt gained the 
 mastery over the studies of the place, and became the 
 heralds and agents of the triumph which, in the opinion 
 of the world of culture at large, Eeuchlin celc- 
 
OF THE GERMAN EBNASCBNCB. 41 
 
 brated over his persecutors. For there can be little 
 doubt that to the Erfurt brotherhood, and more espe- 
 cially to one of its members (Crotus Rubianus), is to 
 be ascribed the main authorship of the most effective 
 production of the Renascence spirit in its conflict 
 with the representatives of worn-out scholasticism. 
 The EpistolcB Ohscurorum Virorum in their effect sur- 
 passed even the Encomium Morice of Erasmus itself, 
 among other reasons because of their superior directness, 
 for while in the earlier satire it is an allegorical (and 
 not always consistent) FoUy who speaks, in the later 
 it is the invariably consistent Fools themselves. At 
 the same time we must not suppose that all the 
 victims of the satire (its chief victim, for instance, 
 Magister Ortuin Gratius, of Cologne,) were actually 
 the types in which it presents them. There is no 
 such thing as personal justice in Hudibrastic litera- 
 ture ; but the conflict and its provocation were typical, 
 and so was its result. 
 
 This band of scholars included many whose names 
 are forgotten in the history of the Renascence ; above all, 
 Eobanus Hessus, who after the withdrawal of Mutianus 
 persevered in upholding the standard they had jointly 
 erected, but for whom in the end the troubles of the 
 times proved too strong, as they did for the university 
 which he loved, and served, and celebrated in his 
 verse. That university, and more especially the 
 sodalitium Eobani, had warmly welcomed the move- 
 ment of the monk who at Erfurt itself had, as he 
 says, taken his degree on the strength of the writings 
 of the Anti-Roman Erfurt teacher, John of Wesel ; 
 
42 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 its theological faculty had publicly condemned the 
 papal bull launched against Luther ; and Erfurt seemed 
 destined to play a part in the history of the Refor- 
 mation analogous to that which it had played in the 
 history of the Eenascence. But this was not to be. 
 The Eeformation movement entered into a phase 
 which separated Luther from his own extreme fol- 
 lowers ; throughout large parts of Germany the 
 democratic spirit of the towns was aroused against 
 the ruling oligarchies ; the peasantry began its hope- 
 less struggle for half-reasonable, half-impossible ends ; 
 and at the head of the clamouring multitudes, stood 
 the preachers as they proclaimed themselves to be 
 of the pure Gospel. The alliance was at an end 
 between academical liberalism and religious reform. 
 The University of Erfurt was desolated by the troubles 
 of the times ; its famous teachers, the humanists, were 
 now derided as the sophists ; their lecture-rooms stood 
 empty, their occupation was gone. But though the 
 lives of many of them closed in dreariness and 
 despondency, while others had fallen back into an 
 attitude of hostility, or sought to maintain one of 
 neutrality towards the great religious Eevolution — 
 for it was now seen to be nothing less — yet their 
 labours had not been in vain. 
 
 I wish that time had remained for me to attempt 
 to sketch the activity of some of these men as 
 scholars and teachers. As it is I can hardly speak 
 of even one of them, whose portrait more than 
 one writer has essayed. Helius Eobanus Hessus, 
 as he wrote himself with triple name, more Romano, 
 
OF THE GERMAN RENASCENCE. 43 
 
 taking his cognomen from his native land and his 
 prsenomen partly with the intent that there should 
 be no doubt concerning his relations to Phoebus 
 Apollo — ^was saluted by his admiring friends and by 
 Reuchlin himself as the king of the poets ; he was 
 the Ben Jonson of his circle in the veneration 
 he enjoyed from it, as well as in his capacity for 
 work and for relaxation. His robust nature enabled 
 him to accept without fear or faltering the move- 
 ment of Luther, and to maintain his sympathy for 
 the bold Reformer to the last. But as a scholar he 
 is especially remarkable for the thoroughness with 
 which he performed the task of his life — that of 
 familiarising his generation with classical literature 
 (or getting by translation), and bringing into honour 
 the art, indispensable to all closer scholarship, of 
 classical composition. It was he of whom Erasmus 
 said (with perhaps less felicity than usual) that he 
 had attained to what Cicero had failed to compass — 
 for he wrote prose as if he had never served the 
 Muses, and poetry as if he had never come into con- 
 tact with pedestrian speech. Eobanus and his friends, 
 instead of talking a great deal about the classics and 
 the classical tongues, brought the ancient writers 
 themselves and their speech home to the studies of 
 their age ; they sought to possess themselves of their 
 materials instead of nibbling at them here and there, 
 each attaching himself more especially to one classical 
 writer as his chosen subject ; and thus, though their 
 own range was often limited, and though their worship 
 of the outward form was perhaps raised to excess, yet 
 
44 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 they set to their age the example of a scientific enthu- 
 siasm and a scholarly thoroughness to be appreciated 
 even by those who take no joy in, or may see reason 
 to find fault with, Eobanus' hexameters and hendeca- 
 syllables. It is not purely as classical scholars that 
 all the members of his band, among whom in their 
 days of daring flitted the unquiet spirit of Ulrich von 
 Hutten, are to be remembered ; there was at least one 
 famous theologian among them and a physician ; but 
 it is in classical studies that they found their bond of 
 union, and in their proficiency in these that they may 
 be looked upon as a school. And it is schools such as 
 this, formed among kindred spirits engaged in kindred 
 pursuits, which constitute the characterising elements 
 of universities, as this did in the great days of the 
 University of Erfurt. 
 
 Does it seem strange, in days when the field of 
 academical studies has become as wide and varied as 
 it is now — even among ourselves, and far more 
 signally in Germany — to dwell with emphasis on the 
 significance for academical life of the thorough culti- 
 vation of particular branches of study 1 Does it 
 seem frivolous to point, as to a memorable example 
 of academical efi"ort, to the labours of men whose aims 
 may seem to us curiSusly special, and whose ideals 
 we may judge to bear no comparison to our own ? 
 Though classical scholarship itself includes in our 
 eyes many things which it did not and could not in- 
 clude in those of the humanists of whom I have been 
 speaking, and though classical scholarship is but one 
 of the many branches of academical study it is our 
 
OF THE GERMAN RENASCENCE. 45 
 
 wish to see cultivated among and around us, yet in 
 the thoroughness of these students, which was the 
 result of their enthusiasm, lies the feature entitling 
 them to our respect and challenging our imita- 
 tion. A university which fails to train scholars 
 in the wider sense of the word to which men of 
 •science have a right to lay claim, or which, if they 
 will renounce their claim to a specific title, fails to 
 train men of science in the sense of the appellation in 
 which linguistic and other scholars were entitled to 
 share it, has no future of enduring influence before 
 it. There are dead universities which have never 
 been buried ; the life of a university lies neither in 
 its matriculation-registers nor even in its degree- 
 lists ; it lies in the spirit of thoroughness which it 
 fosters and communicates to its members ; it lies in 
 the schools of research which it founds and sends 
 forth. No one can say in what field a particular 
 university may succeed in being or remaining pre- 
 eminently active and influential ; though circumstances 
 will naturally lend their aid in particular directions. 
 Very few of the German universities were, like 
 Tubingen, early urged in the special direction in 
 which they have gained their greenest laurels ; and 
 at the present day, a,s you are aware, their respective 
 pre-eminence in connexion with particular branches 
 of study has been liable to frequent changes. Whether 
 in Germany or elsewhere, it is not in the nature of 
 things that a university should shine equally in all 
 its departments of teaching. But the spirit which 
 sustains effort and creates the desire for thoroughness 
 
46 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPEKIEKCBS 
 
 is not the product of circumstances only or chiefly ; 
 it is one of the most natural, as it is one of the 
 noblest, emanations of a really vigorous academical 
 life. 
 
 The substance of these remarks, in which it had 
 been very far from my wish to include anything with 
 a controversial tendency, had been put on paper last 
 month, when it so happened that my attention was 
 attracted by an article in one of the periodical ma- 
 gazines, entitled The Multiplication of Universities. 
 I should not, at the close of the address which may 
 have already overtaxed your patience, have made any 
 reference to this most recent contribution to the dis- 
 cussion of a question in which no one here can faU 
 to take some measure of interest, were it not for two 
 reasons. In the first place, the author of this paper 
 is Mr. J. Bass MuUinger, of St. John's College, Cam- 
 bridge, a writer whose labours in the field of acade- 
 mical history have already obtained for him merited 
 distinction, and whose admirable History of the 
 University of Cambridge from the earliest Time to 
 the Royal Injunctions of 1535, has of late been to 
 me — incidentally even for one or the other point in 
 this morning's observations — a source of frequent 
 reference and information. In the second place, 
 Mr. MuUinger's paper, professing to point out what 
 guidance may be gained from the past history of 
 Universities in discussing the question as to the 
 establishment of new centres of university training, 
 includes in its survey much of the ground whence I 
 
OP THE GERMAN RENASCENCE. 47 
 
 had derived the suggestions of my present address. 
 His brief essay in its longer or historical part dis- 
 tinguishes perspicuously between the three well-known 
 stages in the history of European universities — the 
 first in which they were cosmopolitan or European 
 (the period of the ascendancy, though not the undis- 
 puted ascendancy of Paris), the second in which they 
 were ethnical or national (the period in which the 
 ascendancy of Paris came to an end, and among 
 other universities those of which I have been speaking 
 this morning were established), and the third in which 
 the universities, so he says, became provincial and 
 sectarian (the post-Eeformation period, when in 
 Germany the universities became exclusively Catholic 
 or Protestant, and even the Protestant universities 
 were severally appropriated to the control of distinct 
 theological tendencies). He touches on similar 
 phenomena in other countries ; but it is from German 
 university life that he prefers chiefly to illustrate his 
 argument. He shows that it was not till the close 
 of the seventeenth century that the movement 
 began whereby the German universities regained their 
 national, if not their cosmopolitan character, and that 
 this great recovery was necessarily attended by the 
 incorporation of several of the old and worn-out 
 ■foundations with newer and more vigorous growths, 
 and by the extinction of others which had come to be 
 recognised as superfluous. 
 
 Now the few. hints on which I have ventured this 
 morning as to the true character of university 
 endeavours and university life, so far as they are 
 
48 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 things of the present and not of the past, when the 
 chief peoples of Europe had not yet established their 
 educational life on a distinctly though not exclusively 
 national basis, may have prepared you, for a ready 
 assent on my part to Mr. MuUinger's conclusion that 
 the national university would appear to be the highest 
 practicable conception in the present age. Such a 
 university, as he justly observes, postulates not merely 
 adequate material resources but a certain numerical 
 strength. Such an institution, as he rightly adds, 
 depends for the elevation of its thought, the dignity 
 of its relations, and the due extension of its influence, 
 -on the elimination of all that is provincial, petty, and 
 sectarian. It seems a necessary corollary that such 
 centres of intellectual culture rather than of mere 
 acquisition do not admit of indefinite multiplication. 
 
 So far I had read, and I had likewise agreed to the 
 moderately-put statement that, whatever may be said 
 of the past, the last quarter of the century has been 
 marked by a series of eminently successful efforts on 
 the part of Oxford and Cambridge towards the reali- 
 sation of a high national ideal — when I came in eye- 
 shot of the close of Mr. MuUinger's article, where in 
 its last page and a half the application seemed at last 
 to be imminent. The present time would, he says, 
 appear to afford little justification of any attempt to 
 institute in this country the provincial in opposition 
 to the national university. Manchester, he assumes, 
 is proposing such an experiment ; and already, as he 
 has learnt, Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, and Not- 
 tingham are designated as the seats of new and 
 
OF THE GERMAN RENASCENCE. 49 
 
 independent universities, conducting their own ex- 
 aminations and conferring their own degrees. Mr. 
 Mullinger is evidently terrified by a vision of a kind 
 of academical commune ; and seems to imagine a plan 
 on foot for the foundation of a new university in every 
 important town in England, which might certainly 
 have the result of creating a number of 'petty' if 
 not necessarily ' sectarian ' centres. I do not know 
 who are the ' designating ' persons he has in view ; 
 I only know that of the towns mentioned by him one 
 (Leeds) has openly advocated the plan intended to 
 prevent the foundation of a multiplicity of new 
 centres, and eventually aiming at the incorporation of 
 its own college in a university of a federal type — whUe 
 another (Nottingham) has avowed its desire of ' acting 
 with the University of Cambridge,' — an expression 
 which I do not undertake to define, but which certainly 
 does not seem to indicate a desire to become ' the 
 seat of a new and independent university.' 
 
 Not very consistently with his fears of indefinite 
 multiplication, Mr. Mullinger proceeds to speak of a 
 second unhappy scheme entertained, as it seems, by 
 those whom he describes as the advocates of a charter 
 for Manchester. It is the vision of a great central 
 school of scientific teaching with affiliated colleges 
 throughout the country. A deplorable prospect is 
 thus held out of science and letters, philosophy and 
 theology, tradition and invention, drawing oflF into 
 rival and hostile centres of education and instruction. 
 What are the facts ? The scheme which has been put 
 forth from Manchester contemplates the possibility of 
 
50 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 uniting with our own College into a single university 
 other colleges, which on due consideration, and even- 
 tually after appeal to the supreme educational au- 
 thority of the Grovernment, shall have been proved to 
 possess a reasonably complete curriculum and a rea- 
 sonably complete teaching-staflf- in the departments 
 of Arls and Science at least. And the central school 
 of scientific teaching is a left-handedly complimentary 
 and an imperfectly correct description of our own 
 College itself, with the means and opportunities 
 belonging to it in all its departments, and with a 
 system of instruction which never has been and never 
 can be (according to the charter of our foundation) 
 confined to a single side of academical teaching. The 
 eminence of our scientific school, of which it is, I hope, 
 not unbecoming in a professor who has no share in 
 its labours or honours to express his recognition, has 
 not led either the authorities or the teachers and 
 students of Owens College to regard it as absorbing 
 either the efibrts or the destinies, whatever those 
 destinies may prove to be, of the College at large. It 
 certainly has no intention of relinquishing or pre- 
 judicing its efibrts in other directions, even though 
 for some time to come those who in it pursue the 
 older studies may look to a modest place among their 
 academical representatives, well content if thej" may 
 in due season be accounted 
 
 ' Extremi primorum, extremis usque priores.' 
 
 Finally, Mr. MuUinger has discovered, and supports 
 his discovery by a quotation which I have not cared 
 
OP THE GERMAN EBNASCBNCE. 61 
 
 to verify, from what he describes as ' one of the 
 latest manifestoes of the supporters ' of our scheme, . 
 that it is conceived in a spirit unfriendly to the old 
 universities. I may leave the author of the article 
 from which he quotes to take care of himself; but 
 being tolerably well acquainted with what has been 
 written and said by those who have acted as repre- 
 sentatives of our College in this matter, I may inform 
 Mr. MuUinger that he absolutely mistakes the tone 
 and spirit in which its action has been carried on. It 
 has neither been forgotten what is due to the national 
 traditions, nor what is due to the actual labours of 
 the two Universities, with one or the other of which 
 many of us are connected by ties of personal piety as 
 well as of national pride ; and if those Universities, 
 which are not beyond criticism for the very reason 
 that they are national institutions, have their short- 
 comings,- it is not as a mere corrective to these that 
 we desire to secure for our own academical life a broad 
 and nationally recognised basis. If the university to 
 which some of us aspire cannot rise above the ' local 
 prejudice' (whatever that may signify) of a part of 
 England which has not been usually accounted devoid 
 of national spirit, or slack in national effort — if there 
 is any reasonable ground for apprehending that a 
 system of education such as it has been from the first 
 our bounden duty to maintain and seek to perfect, and 
 such as has with us certainly not selected its agents on 
 any unduly assimilative principle, wUl be precipi- 
 tated into * the cliqueism of a school,' — if our per- 
 
52 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES 
 
 formance of our own tasks prove incompatible witli a 
 willingness to recognise the services of other and more 
 venerable seats of learning — then, indeed, the mis- 
 givings of our most recent critic wUl have been veri- 
 fied. But he owes his readers the proof of his mistrust 
 of us on each of these heads ; and though we do not 
 resent it as an insult when he charges us with ' pro- 
 vincial ambition,' we may ask what right he has to 
 assume ours to be other than national ends. His 
 historical argument, if it is worth anything at all, 
 shows that a rapid, almost simultaneous, and so far as 
 local distribution goes, wholly unsystematic multipli- 
 cation of universities is likely to outrun the national 
 need, to necessitate eventual r evision, and even (where 
 particular interests are strong enough to prevail) to 
 prejudice the progress of national higher education on 
 its broadest lines. In what way or sense does it prove 
 that there is anything imprudent in the addition of 
 a single national university to the number already 
 existing in this country — on conditions not only 
 giving securities to the present, but safeguarding the 
 interests without foreclosing the policy of the future ? 
 How far this is a correct description of the scheme 
 which has been proposed on behalf of this College, the 
 present is not a fitting occasion to discuss. But what- 
 ever the future may have in store, we may in all 
 tranquillity adhere to the conviction that the useful- 
 ness of a seat of academical education must in any 
 case primarily depend upon the efforts of its teachers 
 ;xnd students. Elevation of aim, patriotism of spirit. 
 
OF THE GEEMAN EENASCENCE. 53 
 
 comprehensiveness of system, thoroughness of method 
 — these features of true academical work it seemed 
 worth whUe even cursorily to illustrate from the 
 records of a time and a nation with which our own 
 have something in common, however widely our 
 means and opportunities may differ from theirs. 
 
54 ON SOME ACADEMICAL EXPERIENCES, ETC, 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 Since this address was delivered, I have noticed that in a 
 contribution to the Bulletin historique of the Bevue 
 Historigue (Paris) for September-October, 1878, Mr. MuUin- 
 ger has repeated the substance of the mis-apprehensions 
 noticed by me in his paper in Fraser's Magazine. It is 
 unnecessary to recur to these, or to enquire what are Mr. 
 MulHnger's grounds for the illustrative observation, that en 
 AUemagne, sur 35 ^tablissements universitaires environ, 10 a 
 peine mferitent le nom d'universit^s.' But I feel bound not to 
 pass by the following additional information offered by Mr. 
 Mullinger to his French readers. ' Le College d'Owen,' he 
 says, 'est depuis longtemps un remarquable ^tablissement 
 d'instruction supMeure pour la ville et sa banlieue; le 
 nombre de ses 61^ves (quoique beaucoup d'entre eux ne 
 soient que des enfants) est considerable.' As a matter of 
 fact, Owens College draws its students from a far wider 
 district than Manchester and its immediate vicinity, as well 
 as in many cases from a distance; and the ages of those 
 students in the Day Classes (exclusively of the Medical 
 School) of the College stood as follows at the beginning of 
 the Session 1877-8 :— 
 
 Age at entrance. No. of students. 
 
 Under 16 years 18 
 
 Between 16 and 18 134 
 
 » 18 „ 20 118 
 
 About 20 148 
 
 418 
 
 The students entering under 16 years of age are required 
 to pass a special preliminary examination. I am afraid that 
 Mr. Mullinger is as little acquainted with the College about 
 which he writes as with the proposals which he has taken 
 upon himself to criticise. 
 
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