History has preserved the names of several of these wandering scholars who sowed the seeds of classical studies in Germany, and there were, doubtless, many who have been forgotten. Loose living, irreligious, their one gift a genuine desire to know and impart a knowledge of the ancient classical literature, careless how they fared provided only they could study and teach Latin and Greek, they were the disreputable apostles of the New Learning, and in their careless way scattered it over the northern lands. § 7. The Humanist Circles in the Cities. The seed-beds of the German Renaissance were at first not so much the Universities, as associations of intimates in some of the cities. Three were pre-eminent,—Strassburg, Augsburg, and Nürnberg,—all wealthy imperial cities, having intimate relations with the imperial court on the one hand and with Italy on the other. The Humanist circle at Nürnberg was perhaps the most distinguished, and it stood in closer relations than any other with the coming Reformation. Its best known member was Willibald Pirkheimer(31) (1470-1528), whose training had been more that of a young Florentine patrician than of the son of a German burgher. His father, a wealthy Nürnberg merchant of great intellectual gifts and attainments, a skilled diplomatist, and a confidential friend of the Emperor Maximilian, superintended his son’s education. He took the boy with him on the journeys which trade or the diplomatic business of his city compelled him to make, and initiated him into the mysteries of commerce and of German politics. The lad was also trained in the knightly accomplishments of horsemanship and the skilful use of weapons. He was sent, like many a young German patrician, to Padua and Pavia (1490-1497) to study jurisprudence and the science of diplomacy, and was advised not to neglect opportunities to acquire the New Learning. When he returned, in his twenty-seventh year, he was appointed one of the counsellors of the city, and was entrusted with an important share in the management of its business. In this capacity it was necessary for him to make many a journey to the Diet or to the imperial court, and he soon became a favourite with the Emperor Maximilian, who rejoiced in converse with a mind as versatile as his own. No German so nearly approached the many-sided culture of the leading Italian Humanists as did this citizen of Nürnberg. On the other hand, he possessed a fund of earnestness which no Italian seems to have possessed. He was deeply anxious about reformation in Church and State, and after the Leipzig disputation had shown that Luther’s quarrel with the Pope was no mere monkish dispute, but went to the roots of things, he was a sedate supporter of the Reformation in its earlier stages. His sisters Charitas and Clara, both learned ladies, were nuns in the Convent of St. Clara at Nürnberg. The elder, who was the abbess of her convent, has left an interesting collection of letters, from