The work of the Lutheran educators would, of course, have been impracticable if it had not been for the rapid development of the publishing and book-selling trade of the country, a development the chief incentive of which is also due to Luther. “Now the printers will have their hands full,” writes Hutten in 1517, to the Count of Neuenar, when he hears of Luther’s declaration against the operations of Tetzel. Hutten’s prophecy was fulfilled far beyond his largest imaginings. The bold attack of Luther was directed not merely at Tetzel and his fraudulent auction sales of God’s forgiveness of sins, but at the corruption and demoralisation of the Church, a demoralisation of which, as Luther recognised, Tetzel and his Indulgences were but an inconsiderable symptom. The downfall of imperial Rome, which (irrespective of the internal causes) was brought about by persistent Teutonic onslaughts, terminated the period of the world’s history which is, for convenience, called classic or ancient. In like manner, the overthrow of the world-wide domination of ecclesiastical Rome was brought about by the attack of the Teuton Luther, an attack which, backed up by the Teutonic forces of North Europe, developed into a revolution against Italian rule, and terminated the epoch of mediævalism. For long periods to come, however, the questions raised by Luther and his fellow Protestants were to bring anxieties and conflicts upon popes, emperors, princes, and people. These questions were also to provide issues and themes for innumerable writers, and to secure an apparently inexhaustible supply of material for the printing-presses and the booksellers. It is only with this last-named result that, for the purposes of the present study, I am concerned.