ennium of Christianity, when the earth
had not, according to the current prophecies, been destroyed, and after
the great plague in the fourteenth century, there was felt an immense
pleasure in living, which manifested itself externally in the fifteenth
century in delicate wines, dainty food, great eating of meat, drinking
of beer, and, in the domain of dress, in peaked shoes, plumes, golden
chains, bells, &c. There was much venison, but, as yet, no potatoes, tea
and coffee, &c. The feeling of men was quarrelsome. For a more exact
painting of the Education of this time, very valuable authors are
Sebastian Brant, Th. Murner, Ulrich von Hutten, Fischart, and Hans
Sachs. Gervinus is almost the only one who has understood how to make
this material useful in its relation to spirit.--

Sec. 251. In contrast with the heaven-seeking of the monks and the
sentimental love-making of the knight, civil education established, as
its principle, Usefulness, which traced out in things their conformity
to a proposed end in order to gain as great a mastery over them as
possible. The understanding was trained with all exactness that it might
clearly seize all the circumstances. But since family-life did not allow
the egotism of the individual ever to become as great as was the case
with the monk and the knight, and since the cheer of a sensuous
enjoyment in cellar and kitchen, in clothing and furniture, in common
games and in picturesque parades, penetrated the whole being with soft
pleasure, there was developed with all propriety and sobriety a
house-morality, and, with all the prose of labor, a warm and kindly
disposition, which left room for innocent merriment and roguery, and
found, in conformity to religious services, its serious transfiguration.
Beautiful burgher-state, thou wast weakened by the thirty years' war,
and hast been only accidentally preserved sporadically in Old England
and in some places in Germany, only to be at last swept away by the
flood of modern world-pain, political sophistry, and anxiety for the
future!

Sec. 252. The citizen paid special attention to public education,
heretofore wholly dependent upon the church and the cloister; he
organized city schools, whose teachers, it is true, for a long time
compassed only accidental culture, and were often employed only for
tumultuous and short terms. The society of the brotherhood of the
Hieronymites introduced a better system of instruction before the close
of the fo