New universities have been founded: Marburg, in 1527; Königsberg, in 1547; Jena, in 1558; Helmstädt, in 1575; Giessen, in 1607. And the more the number and the power of the professors increased, the more they forgot that they and their learning, their universities and their libraries, were for the benefit of the people; that a professor might be very learned, and very accurate, and very laborious, yet worse than useless as a member of our toiling society. It was considered more learned and respectable to teach in Latin, and all lectures at the universities were given in that language. Luther was sneered at because of his little German tracts which “any village clerk might have written.” Some of the best poets in the sixteenth century were men such as Eoban Hessius (1540), who composed their poetry in Latin. National poems, for instance, Brant’s “Ship of Fools,” were translated into Latin in order to induce the German professors to read them. The learned doctors were ashamed of their honest native names. Schwarzerd must needs call himself Melancthon; Meissel Celtes, Schnitter Agricola; Hausschein, Œcolampadius! All this might look very learned, and professorial, and imposing; but it separated the professors from the people at large; it retarded the progress of national education, and blighted the prospects of a national policy in Germany. Everything promised well at the time of the Reformation; and a new Germany might have risen before a new France, if, like Luther, the leaders of the nation had remained true to their calling. But when to speak Latin was considered more learned than to speak German, when to amass vast information was considered more creditable than to digest and to use it, when popularity became the same bugbear to the professors which profanity had been to the clergy, and vulgarity to the knights, Luther’s work was undone; and two more centuries had to be spent in pedantic controversies, theological disputes, sectarian squabbles, and political prostration, before a new national spirit could rise again in men like Lessing, and Schiller, and Fichte, and Stein. Ambitious princes and quarrelsome divines continued the rulers of Germany, and, towards the end of the sixteenth century, everything seemed drifting back into the Middle Ages. Then came the Thirty Years’ War, a most disastrous war for Germany, which is felt in its results to the present day. If, as a civil and religious contest, it had been fought out between the two parties,—the Protestants and Roman Catholics of Germany,—it would have left, as in England, one side victorious; it would have been brought to an end before both were utterly exhausted. But the Protestants, weakened by their own dissensions, had to call in foreign aid. First Denmark, then Sweden, poured their armies into Germany, and even France—Roman Catholic France—gave her support to Gustavus Adolphus and the Protestant cause. England, the true ally of Germany, was too weak at home to make her