eachers]

Teachers in the lower schools were regarded as lackeys and paid
accordingly. Nicholas Udal, head master of Eton, received $50 per
annum and various small allowances. University professors were treated
more liberally. Luther and Melanchthon at Wittenberg got a maximum of
$224 per annum, which was about the same as the stipend of leading
professors in other German universities and at Oxford and Cambridge.
The teacher also got a small honorarium from each student. When Paul
III restored the Sapienza at Rome he paid a minimum of $17 per annum to
some friars who taught theology and who were cared for by their order,
but he gave high salaries to the professors of rhetoric and medicine.
Ordinarily these received $476 a year, but one professor of the
classics reached the highwater-mark with nearly $800.

[Sidenote: Royalties]

The rewards of literary men were more consistently small in the
sixteenth century than they are now, owing to the absence of effective
copyright. An author usually received a small sum from the printer to
whom he first offered his manuscript, but his subsequent royalties, if
any, depended solely on the goodwill of the publisher. A Wittenberg
printer offered Luther $224 per annum for his manuscripts, but the
Reformer declined it, wishing to make his books as cheap as possible.
In 1512 Erasmus got $8.40 from Badius the Parisian printer for a new
edition of his _Adages_. In fact, the rewards of letters, such as they
were, were indirect, in the form of pensions, gifts and benefices from
the great. Erasmus got so many of these favors that he lived more than
comfortably. Luther died almost a rich man, so many _honoraria_ did he
collect from noble admirers. Rabelais was given a benefice, though
{472} he only lived two years afterwards to enjoy its fruits. Henry
VIII gave $500 to Thomas Murner for writing against Luther. But the
lot of the average writer was hard. Fulsome flattery was the most
lucrative production of the muse.

[Sidenote: Artists]

Artists fared better. Duerer sold one picture for $375 and another for
$200, not counting the "tip" which his wife asked and received on each
occasion from the patron. Probably his woodcuts brought him more from
the printers than any single painting, and when he died he left the
then respectable sum of $32,000. He had been offered a pension of $300
per annum and a house at Antwerp by that city if he would settle there,
but he preferred t