abate the 'Italian insolence.'
The visitor told Erasmus that he was sure to be a great man, and patted
the young Hermann on the head, saying that he had the look of a poet;
and he is, indeed, still faintly remembered for the lines in which he
celebrated the triumph of Reuchlin.

Reuchlin had learned Greek at Paris and Poitiers; at Florence he studied
the secrets of the Cabala with Mirandula; and he perfected his Hebrew at
Rome, where he acted as an envoy from the Elector Palatine. Reuchlin for
many years led a peaceful life at Tuebingen, an oasis of freedom, in which
he could print or read what he pleased. But in 1509 he was forced into a
quarrel, which involved the whole question of the liberty of the press,
and incidentally associated the cause of the Reformation with the
maintenance of classical learning.

In the year 1509 one Pfefferkorn, a monk who had been a convert from
Judaism, obtained an imperial decree that all Hebrew books, except the
Scriptures, should be destroyed. Reuchlin sprang forth to defend his
beloved Cabala, and maintained that only those volumes ought to be burned
which were proved to have a taint of magic or blasphemy. He was cited to
answer for his heresy before the Grand Inquisitor at Cologne; and the
world, at first indifferent, soon saw that the cause of the New Learning
was at stake. In the summer of 1514 there was a notable gathering of
Reformers at Frankfort Fair. We have nothing in our own days that quite
resembles these mediaeval marts; the annual concourse of merchants might
perhaps be compared to one of our industrial exhibitions, or to some
conjunction of all the trade of Leipsic and Nijni Novgorod. The Italians
affected to believe that the Fair by the Main was chiefly taken up with
the sale of mechanical contrivances; the Germans knew that their 'Attic
mart' held streets of book-shops and publishers' offices. Henri Estienne
saw Professors here from Oxford and Cambridge, from Louvain, and from
Padua: there was a crowd of poets, historians, and men of science; and he
declared that another Alexandrian Library might be bought in those
seething stalls, if one laid out money like a king, or like a maniac, as
others might say. In this German Athens a meeting was arranged between
Reuchlin and Erasmus; they were joined at Frankfort by Hermann Busch, who
brought with him the manuscript of his 'Triumph'; and perhaps it was not
difficult to predict that the cause of the old books would be safe