In all those civic circles, poets and artists were found as members—Hans Holbein at Augsburg; Albert Dürer, with Hans Sebaldus Beham, at Nürnberg. The contemporary Italian painters, when they ceased to select their subjects from Scripture or from the Lives of the Saints, turned instinctively to depict scenes from the ancient pagan mythology. The German artists strayed elsewhere. They turned for subjects to the common life of the people. But the change was gradual. The Virgin ceased to be the Queen of Heaven and became the purest type of homely human motherhood, and the attendant angels, sportive children plucking flowers, fondling animals, playing with fruit. In Lucas Cranach’s “Rest on the Flight to Egypt” two cherubs have climbed a tree to rob a bird’s nest, and the parent birds are screaming at them from the branches. In one of Albert Dürer’s representations of the Holy Family, the Virgin and Child are seated in the middle of a farmyard, surrounded by all kinds of rural accessories. Then German art plunged boldly into the delineation of the ordinary commonplace life—knights and tournaments, merchant trains, street scenes, pictures of peasant life, and especially of peasant dances, university and school scenes, pictures of the camp and of troops on the march. The coming revolution in religion was already proclaiming that all human life, even the most commonplace, could be sacred; and contemporary art discovered the picturesque in the ordinary life of the people—in the castles of the nobles, in the markets of the cities, and in the villages of the peasants. § 8. Humanism in the Universities. The New Learning made its way gradually into the Universities. Classical scholars were invited to lecture or settle as private teachers in university towns, and the students read Cicero and Virgil, Horace and Propertius, Livy and Sallust, Plautus and Terence. One of the earliest signs of the growing Humanist feeling appeared in changes in one of the favourite diversions of German students. In all the mediæval Universities at carnival time the students got up and performed plays. The subjects were almost invariably taken from the Scriptures or from the Apocrypha. Chaucer says of an Oxford student, that “Sometimes to shew his lightnesse and his mastereye He played Herod on a gallows high.” At the end of the fifteenth century the subjects changed, and students’ plays were either reproductions from Plautus or Terence, or original compositions representing the common life of the time. The legal recognition of Humanism within a University commonly showed itself in the institution of a lectureship of Poetry or Oratory—for the German Humanists were commonly known as the “Poets.” Freiburg established a chair of Poetry in 1471, and Basel in 1474; in Tübingen the stipend for an Orator was legally sanctioned in 1481, and Conrad Celtis was appointed to a chair of Poetry and Eloquence in 1492.