§ 251. In contrast with the heaven-seeking of the monks and the sentimental love-making of the knight, civil education established, as its principle, Usefulness, which traced out in things their conformity to a proposed end in order to gain as great a mastery over them as possible. The understanding was trained with all exactness that it might clearly seize all the circumstances. But since family-life did not allow the egotism of the individual ever to become as great as was the case with the monk and the knight, and since the cheer of a sensuous enjoyment in cellar and kitchen, in clothing and furniture, in common games and in picturesque parades, penetrated the whole being with soft pleasure, there was developed with all propriety and sobriety a house-morality, and, with all the prose of labor, a warm and kindly disposition, which left room for innocent merriment and roguery, and found, in conformity to religious services, its serious transfiguration. Beautiful burgher-state, thou wast weakened by the thirty years' war, and hast been only accidentally preserved sporadically in Old England and in some places in Germany, only to be at last swept away by the flood of modern world-pain, political sophistry, and anxiety for the future! § 252. The citizen paid special attention to public education, heretofore wholly dependent upon the church and the cloister; he organized city schools, whose teachers, it is true, for a long time compassed only accidental culture, and were often employed only for tumultuous and short terms. The society of the brotherhood of the Hieronymites introduced a better system of instruction before the close of the fourteenth century, but education had often to be obtained from the so-called travelling scholars (_vagantes_, _bacchantes_, _scholastici_, _goliardi_). The teachers of the so-called _scholæ exteriores_, in distinction from the schools of the cathedral and cloister, were called now _locati_, then _stampuales_——in German, _Kinder-Meister_. The institution of German schools soon followed the Latin city schools. In order to remove the anarchy in school matters, the citizens aided the rise of universities by donations and well-invested funds, and sustained the street-singing of the city scholars (_currende_), an institution which was well-meant, but which often failed of its end because on the one hand it was often misused as a mere means of subsistence, and on the other hand the sense of honor of those to whom it was devoted not unfrequently became, through their manner of living, lowered to humiliation. The defect of the monkish method of instruction became ever more apparent, e.g. the silly tricks of their mnemotechnique, the utter lack of anything which deserved the name of any practical knowledge, &c. The necessity of instruction in the use of arms led to democratic forms. Printing favored the same. Men began to concern themselves about good text-books. Melanchthon was the