In spite of such stuff, Pirckheimer, who saw the book in manuscript, was delighted with it. 'You have achieved what many have wished but few could have carried out. Every German must be obliged to you for the lustre you have brought to the Fatherland.' After stating that he had arranged with Koberger for the printing, he points out details which might be improved: more stress might be laid on the connexion of the Germans with the Goths, 'which the dregs of the Goths and Lombards--by which I mean the Italians--try to snatch from us'; and the universal conquests of the Goths might be more fully treated. Finally he suggests that before publication the work should be submitted to Stabius: 'the book deserves learned readers, and I should wish it to be as perfect as possible.'[43] [43] The letter is printed in Pirckheimer's _Opera_, 1610, p. 313: but is addressed wrongly, to Beatus Rhenanus. This brief survey may close with a far more considerable work, the _Res Germanicae_ of Beatus Rhenanus, published in 1531; from which we have made some extracts above. The book is sober and serious, and the subject-matter is handled scientifically; but in his preface Beatus is careful to point out that German history is as important as Roman, modern as much worth studying as ancient. Such was the soil into which fell the seed that Luther went forth to sow. When Tetzel came marching into German towns, with the Pope's Bull borne before him on a cushion, and brandishing indulgences for the living and the dead, when the coins were tinkling in the box, and the souls, released by contract, were flying off out of purgatory, the religious sense of thinking men was outraged by this travesty of the Day of Judgement; but scarcely less were they angered to see the tinkling coins, honest German money, flying off as rapidly as the souls, to build palaces for the supercilious Italians. In the great struggle of the Reformation the main issue was of course religious; but even its leader could feel added bitterness in the knowledge that this shocking traffic was ordained from Italy to benefit an Italian Pope. If the sympathies of educated Germany had not already been strongly moved in the same direction, it is conceivable that Luther's intrepid protest might have lacked the support which carried it to success. XI ERASMUS AND THE BOHEMIAN BRETHREN (A paper read before the third International Historical Congress, in London, April 1913.)