It should be premised that in its beginnings the modern German drama might have seemed likely to be influenced even more largely than the English or the French by the copious imitation of classical models which marked the periods of the Renaissance and the Reformation; but here the impulse of originality was wanting to bring about a speedy and gradually a complete emancipation, and imitative reproduction continued in an all but endless series. The first German (and indeed the earliest transalpine) writer to follow in the footsteps of the modern Latin drama of the Italians was the famous Strassburg humanist Jacob Wimpheling (1450-1528), whose comedy of _Stylpho_ (1480), an attack upon the ignorance of the pluralist beneficed clergy, marks a kind of epoch in the history of German dramatic effort. It was succeeded by many other Latin plays of various kinds, among which may be mentioned J. Kerckmeister's _Codrus_ (1485), satirizing pedantic schoolmasters; a series of historical dramas in a moralizing vein, partly on the Turkish peril, as well as of comedies, by Jacob Locher (1471-1528); two plays by the great Johann Reuchlin, of which the so-called _Henno_ went through more than thirty editions; and the _Ludus Dianae_, with another play likewise in honour of the emperor Maximilian I., by the celebrated Viennese scholar Conrad Celtes (1459-1508). Sebastian Brant's _Hercules in Bivio_ (1512) is lost; but Wilibald Pirckheimer's _Eckius dedolatus_ (1520) survives as a dramatic contribution to Luther's controversy with one of his most active opponents. The _Acolastus_ (1525) of W. Gnaphaeus (_alias_ Fullonius, his native name was de Volder) should also be mentioned in the present connexion, as, though a Dutchman by birth, he spent most of his literary life in Germany. This Terentian version of the parable of the Prodigal Son was printed in an almost endless number of editions, as well as in various versions in modern tongues, among which reference has already been made to the English, for the use of schools, by J. Palsgrave (1540). Macropedius (Langhveldt) belongs wholly to the Low Countries. In Germany the stream of these compositions continued to flow almost without abatement throughout the earlier half of the 16th century; but in the days of the Reformation it takes a turn to scriptural subjects, and during the latter part of the century remains on the whole faithful to this preference.[273] These Latin plays may be called school-dramas in the most precise sense; for they were both performed in the schools and read in class with commentaries specially composed for them; nor was it except very reluctantly that in this age the vernacular drama was allowed to intrude into scholastic circles. It should be noticed that the Jesuit order, which afterwards proved so keenly alive to the influence which dramatic performances exercise over the youthful mind, only very gradually abandoned the principle, formally sanctioned in their _Ratio studiorum_, that the