ictions to
himself. There were no great theologians, but there was the greatest
religious writer that ever lived, the author of the Imitation, and he
was not a solitary thinker, but a member of a congregation which kept
religion alive, especially in North Germany. The opposition which
arose was stronger and more defined than anything in Italy, but it was
against Catholicism, not against Christianity.

The only matter in which German philology surpassed Italian was
science. The man who turned the course of the new learning into those
channels was Johannes Muller of Konigsberg, near Coburg, therefore
known as Monteregio; as Regiomontanus Bessarion gave him a MS. of
Ptolemy, and he designed a scheme to print the whole body of Greek
mathematicians. His Ephemerides are the origin of the Nautical
Almanack, and enabled Columbus and Vasco and Vespucci to sail the high
seas; and Nuremberg, where he lived, became the chief seat of the
manufacture of nautical instruments. He was made a bishop, and
summoned to Rome to reform the calendar. There was one Italian who
possessed the scientific spirit, without help from books, by the
prerogative of genius; that was Leonardo da Vinci. But he confided
his thoughts to diaries and remained unknown and useless in his time.

The conflict between the new learning and the old, which was repressed
in Italy by the policy of Rome, broke out in Germany, where it was
provoked by the study of Hebrew, not of Greek. At Rome in 1482 a
German student translated a passage of Thucydides so well that the
lecturer complained that Greece was settling beyond the Alps. It was
the first time that the rivalry appeared. That student was Reuchlin.
His classical accomplishments alone would not have made his name one
of the most conspicuous in literary history; but in 1490 Pico della
Mirandola expounded to him the wonders of oriental learning, and
Reuchlin, having found a Rabbi at Linz, began to study Hebrew in 1492.
His path was beset with difficulties, for there were no books in that
language to be found in all Germany. Reuchlin drew his supply from
Italy, and was the first German who read the Cabbala. He shared many
popular prejudices against the Jews, and read their books to help him
with the Old Testament, as he read Greek to help him with the New. He
had none of the grace, the dexterity, the passion, of the Humanists,
and very little of their enthusiasm for the classics. He preferred
Gregory Nazi