hero of the Protestant world, and as a pattern was beyond his time. His
Dialectics, Rhetoric, Physics, and Ethics, were reprinted innumerable
times, commented upon, and imitated. After him Amos Comenius, in the
seventeenth century, had the greatest influence through his _Didactica
Magna_ and his _Janua Reserta_. In a narrower sphere, treating of the
foundation of Gymnasial Philology, the most noticeable is Sturm of
Strasburg. The universities in Catholic countries limited themselves to
the Scholastic Philosophy and Theology, together with which we find
slowly struggling up the Roman Law and the system of Medicine from
Bologna and Salerno. But Protestantism first raised the university to
any real universality. Tübingen, Königsberg, Wittenberg, Jena, Leipzic,
Halle, Göttingen, &c., were the first schools for the study of all
sciences, and for their free and productive pursuit.
§ 253. The Commons, which at first appeared with the clergy and the
nobility as the Third Estate, formed an alliance with monarchy, and both
together produced a transformation of the chivalric education.
Absolutism reduced the knights to mere nobles, to whom it truly conceded
the prerogative of appointment as spiritual prelates as well as officers
and counsellors of state, but only on the condition of the most complete
submission; and then, to satisfy them, it invented the artificial
drinking festivals, of a splendid life at court, and a
temptingly-impressive sovereignty of beauty. In this condition, the
education of the nobles was essentially changed in so far as to cease to
be alone military. To the art of war, which moreover was made so very
much milder by the invention of fire-arms, must be now added an activity
of the mind which could no longer dispense with some knowledge of
History, Heraldry, Genealogy, Literature, and Mythology. Since the
French nation soon enough gave tone to the style of conversation, and
after the time of Louis XIV. controlled the politics of the continent,
the French language, as conventional and diplomatic, became a constant
element in the education of the nobility in all the other countries of
Europe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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