e was a Latin school
established, there the children of the people congregated, often
undergoing the greatest sufferings and hardships, demoralized by the
uncertainty of their daily life; for though the founders and managers
of the schools, or the burghers of the cities, gave these strangers
sometimes a roof over their heads, and beds to lie on, they were
obliged for the most part to beg for their daily subsistence.
Little control was exercised over them; only one thing was strictly
enjoined,--that there should be some method in the lawlessness of their
life; it was only under appointed forms, and in certain districts of
the city, that they were allowed to beg. When the travelling scholar
came to a place where there was a Latin school, he was bound to join
the association of scholars, that he might not make claims on the
benevolence of the inhabitants, to the prejudice of the schoolmaster or
of those already there. An organization was formed among these
scholars, as was always the case where Germans assembled together in
the middle ages, and a code was established, containing many customs
and demoralizing laws, with which every one was obliged to comply;
besides this there was the rough poetry of an adventurous life, which
few could go through without injury to their characters in after life.
The younger scholars, called Schuetzen, were, like the apprentices of
artisans, bound to perform the most humiliating offices for their older
comrades, the Bacchanten: they had to beg and even to steal for their
tyrants, who in return gave them the protection of their strength. It
was considered honourable and advantageous for a Bacchant to have many
Schuetzen, who obtained gifts from the benevolent, on which he lived;
but when the rough Bacchant rose to the university, he was paid off for
all the tyrannical injustice he had practised towards the younger
scholars: he had to lay aside his school dress and rude manners, was
received into the distinguished society of students with humiliating
ceremonies, and was obliged in his turn to render service and to bear
rude jests like a slave. The scholars were perpetually changing their
schools, for with many the loitering on the high roads was the main
object; their youth was passed in wild roving from school to school, in
begging, theft, and dissoluteness. Whilst we rejoice in finding a few
individuals who, by strength of mind and ability, rose through all this
to intellectual preeminence,