Copernicus's recent biographers have called attention particularly to the poetical beauties with which he surrounds every mention of the Blessed Virgin and her qualities. As is evident even from our brief resume of the subjects of the odes, the themes selected are just those in which the special devotion of the writer to the Mother of the Saviour could be very well brought out. There are, besides, a number of astronomical allusions which stamp the poems as the work of Copernicus, and which have been sufficient to defend their authenticity against the attacks made by certain critics, who tried to point out how different was the style from that of Copernicus's later years in his scientific writings. The tradition of authorship is, however, too well established on other grounds to be disturbed by criticism of this sort. The poems were dedicated to the Pope. In writing poetry Copernicus was only doing what Tycho Brahe and Kepler, his great successors in astronomy, did after him; and the argument with regard to the difference of style in the two kinds of writings would hold also as regards these authors. {27} Copernicus's years as a boy and man--that is, up to the age of thirty-five--corresponded with a time of great intellectual activity in Europe. This fact is not as generally recognized as it should be, for intellectual activity is supposed to have awakened after the so-called Reformation. During the years from 1472 to 1506, however, there were founded in Germany alone no less than six universities: those of Ingolstadt, Treves, Tubingen, Mentz, Wittenberg, and Frankfort-on-the-Oder. These were not by any means the first great institutions of learning that arose in Germany. The universities of Prague and Vienna were more than a century old, and, with Heidelberg, Cologne, Erfurt, Leipsic, and Rostock, besides Greifswald and Freiburg, founded about the middle of the fifteenth century, had reached a high state of development, and contained larger numbers of students, with few exceptions, than these same institutions have ever had down to our own day. In most cases their charters were derived from the pope; and most of the universities were actually recognized as ecclesiastical institutions, in the sense that their officials held ecclesiastical authority.