The teachers of the city schools were still learned theologians, and, for the most part, poor candidates; the Rector, perhaps, had been appointed from the great school of the Halle Orphan Asylum. They were an interesting class, accustomed to self-denial, frequently afflicted with weakly bodies, the result of the hard, necessitous life through which they have had to work upwards. There were original characters among them; many were queer and perverse, and the majority had no comprehensive knowledge. But in very many of them was hid, perhaps, under strange forms, somewhat of the freedom, greatness, and candour of the ancient world; they had been, since the Reformation, the natural opponents of all pious zelots, even those that came from the great orphan asylum, from the training of the two Frankes and of Joachim Lange were generally more moderate than was satisfactory to the Pietist pastors. The leaves of their Cornelius Nepos were from constant use frightfully black; their lot was to rise slowly from the sixth or fifth form to the dignity of conrectors, with a small increase in their scanty salary. The greatest pleasure of their life was to find sometimes a scholar of capacity, in whom they could plant, besides the refinements of Latin syntax and prosody, some of their favourite ideas--a heathenish view of the greatness of man, influences on which the scholar, perhaps, in his manhood, looked back with a smile. But in this thankless and little esteemed occupation they laboured incessantly to form in the Germans a feeling for the beauty of antiquity, and a capacity for comprehending other races of men. And the unceasing influence exercised by thousands of them on the living generation was increased when Gesner naturalised the Greek language in the schools, and established an entirely new foundation for the instruction of scholars, which was spread by the teachers with enthusiasm; the spirit of antiquity, a thorough comprehension of the writers, not the merely grammatical construction, became the main object. The school of every important town was a Latin one. If it attained to so high a point as to prepare the upper classes for the University, the boys who were to become artisans left when they got to the fourth form. This arrangement contributed to insure a certain amount of education to the citizen, which is now sometimes wanting. It was certainly in itself no great gain for the guild master to have some knowledge of Mavor, and of Cupid and Venus's doves, which were brought forward in all the poems of the learned, and embellished even the almanacks and gingerbread; but, together with these conceptions from antiquity, his mind imbibed also the seed of the new ideas of the time. It is owing to this kind of school culture that enlightenment of mind has so rapidly spread among intelligent citizens.