Before proceeding to the Rehearsal of the _Martini Actus_, I impose upon myself, as dramaturgist of the play, the duty, if not of extracting, at least of recording, the Conrector's Letter of Invitation. In this composition he said many things; and (what an author likes so well) made proposals rather than reproaches; interrogatively reminding the public, whether, in regard to the well-known head-breakages of Priscian on the part of the Magnates in Pest and Poland, our school-houses were not the best quarantine and lazar-houses to protect us against infectious _barbarisms_? Moreover, he defended in schools what could be defended (and nothing in the world is sweeter or easier than a defence); and said, Schoolmasters, who, not quite justifiably, like certain Courts, spoke nothing, and let nothing be spoken to them, but Latin, might plead the Romans in excuse, whose subjects, and whose kings, at least in their epistles and public transactions, were obliged to make use of the Latin tongue. He wondered why only our Greek, and not also oar Latin Grammars, were composed in Latin, and put the pregnant question, whether the Romans, when they taught their little children the Latin tongue, did it in any other than in this same. Thereupon he went over to the Actus, and said what follows, in his own words:-- "I am minded to prove, in a subsequent Invitation, that everything which can be said or known about the great founder of the Reformation, the subject of our present Martini Prolusions, has been long ago exhausted, as well by Seckendorf as others. In fact, with regard to Luther's personalities, his table-talk, incomes, journeys, clothes, and so forth, there can now nothing new be brought forward, if at the same time it is to be true. Nevertheless, the field of the Reformation history is, to speak in a figure, by no means wholly cultivated; and it does appear to me as if the inquirer even of the present day might in vain look about for correct intelligence respecting the children, grandchildren, and children's children, down to our own times, of this great Reformer; all of whom, however, appertain, in a more remote degree, to the Reformation history, as he himself in a nearer. Thou shalt not perhaps be threshing, said I to myself, altogether empty straw, if, according to thy small ability, thou bring forward and cultivate this neglected branch of History. And so have I ventured, with the last male descendant of Luther, namely, with the Advocate Martin Gottlob Luther, who practised in Dresden, and deceased there in 1759, to make a beginning of a more special Reformation history. My feeble attempt, in regard to this Reformationary Advocate, will be sufficiently rewarded, should it excite to better works on the subject; however, the little which I have succeeded in digging up and collecting with regard to him I here submissively, obediently, and humbly request all friends and patrons of the Flachsenfingen Gymnasium to listen to,