The man who does not--though three and a half centuries lie between--sympathize with the sad, honest simplicity of the poor red-bearded mourner, must be as gross and heartless as was the narrator of the incident. It gives one, indeed, strange subject for reflection, to pause among these old trifles of a by-gone day; jotted down for passing time in a rude age, and yet preserved so clearly, cut and freshly colored in the modern time! Conrad Buehel, the free lance, and his enemy--the red-bearded mourner, the Baron von Stoeffel and his praetor, with the simple minded thief, and timid priests, and the genial but coarse scholar, Bebelius himself, were all real men in their day, who might have passed away without the slightest link to bind their names or natures to an after age--and now they live in a jest! Still they live--and it may be that when the page which you now peruse, O reader, shall be as old as the yellow leaves of the sixteenth century volume now before me, some one may revive them again. It is something to be near a scholar now and then, for no one knows who once crosses his path, but that he too may be noted down, to be borne by an anecdote across stormy centuries, into ages all unlike our own. No man ever yet died out of a printed book. Many a happy thought dashed off by a modern writer, is only the adroit plagiarism of an old joke, 'But oh, the Latin!' says Heinrich Heine, in describing his boyish sorrows to a lady--'Madame, you can really have no idea of what a mess it is. The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world, if they had been first obliged to learn Latin. Lucky dogs! they already knew in their cradles the nouns ending in _im_.' This is a very adroit theft from the _Epistolarum Obscurorum Virorum_, attributed to Von Huetten and others, in which a stupid monk, having argued with Erasmus, writes as follows to his master: 'Then our host, who is a good scholar, began to talk of poetry, and greatly praised JULIUS CAESAR in his writings and deeds. Now when I heard this I was specially delighted that I had read so much, and that I had heard you lecture on poetry in Cologne, and I said: 'Since you speak of poetry, I can no longer keep quiet, and I tell you plainly that I do not believe that CAESAR wrote those commentaries; and I strengthened my assertion with this argument: 'He who has his business in war and in constant labors, cannot learn Latin. Now, CAESAR was always in wars or in great toils, therefore he could not be erudite, or learn Latin.' I think, however, that SUETONIUS wrote those Commentaries, for I never saw any writer whose style so much resembles that of CAESAR, as does that of SUETONIUS.'