As in Italy, the commercial cities were among the first to provide schools of the new type. In 1526 the commercial city of Nuremberg, in southern Germany, opened one of the first of the new city humanistic secondary schools, Melanchthon being present and giving the dedicatory address. A number of similar schools were founded about this time in various German cities--Ilfeld, Frankfort, Strassburg, Hamburg, Bremen, Dantzig--among the number. Many of these failed, as did the one at Nuremberg, to meet the needs of the people in essentially commercial cities. Whatever might have been true in more cultured Italy, in German cities a rigidly classical training for youth and early manhood was found but poorly suited to the needs of the sons of wealthy burghers destined to a commercial career. The rising commerce of the world apparently was to rest on native languages, and not on elegant Latin verse and prose. The commercial classes soon fell back on burgher schools, elementary vernacular schools, writing and reckoning schools, business experience, and travel for the education of their sons, leaving the Latin schools of the humanists to those destined for the service of the Church, the law, teaching, or the higher state service. [Illustration: FIG. 81. JOHANN STURM (1507-89) (After a contemporary engraving by Stofflin)] THE WORK OF JOHANN STURM. The most successful classical school in all Germany, and the one which formed the pattern for future classical creations, was the _gymnasium_ [5] at Strassburg, under the direction (1536-82) of the famous Johann Sturm, or Sturmius, as he came to call himself. This was one of the early classical schools founded by the commercial cities, but it had not been successful. In 1536 the authorities invited Sturm, a graduate of the University of Louvain, and at that time a teacher of classics and dialectic at Paris, where he had come in contact with the humanism brought from Italy, to become head of the school and reorganize it. This he did, and during the forty-five years he was head of the school it became the most famous classical school in continental Europe. His _Plan of Organization_, published in 1538; his _Letters to the Masters_ on the course of study, in 1565; and the record of an examination of each class in the school, conducted in 1578, all of which have been preserved, give us a good idea as to the nature of the organization and instruction (R. 137).