ourts and of a large
part of general literature. Between Luther and Lessing there was no
great writer of German prose.

The age of French influence.

(b) In the early part of the period 1650-1800, while Latin continued to
hold the foremost place, it was ceasing to be Latin of the strictly
classical type. Greek fell still further into the background; and Homer
and Demosthenes gradually gave way to the Greek Testament. Between 1600
and 1775 there was a great gap in the production of new editions of the
principal Greek classics. The spell was only partially broken by J.A.
Ernesti's _Homer_ (1759 f.) and Chr. G. Heyne's _Pindar_ (1773 f.).

Modern and secular education.

The peace of Westphalia (1648) marks a distinct epoch in the history of
education in Germany. Thenceforth, education became more modern and more
secular. The long wars of religion in Germany, as in France and England,
were followed by a certain indifference as to disputed points of
theology. But the modern and secular type of education that now
supervened was opposed by the pietism of the second half of the 17th
century, represented at the newly-founded university of Halle (1694) by
A.H. Francke, the professor of Greek (d. 1727), whose influence was far
greater than that of Chr. Cellarius (d. 1707), the founder of the first
philological _Seminar_ (1697). Francke's contemporary, Chr. Thomasius
(d. 1728), was never weary of attacking scholarship of the old
humanistic type and everything that savoured of antiquarian pedantry,
and it was mainly his influence that made German the language of
university lectures and of scientific and learned literature. A modern
education is also the aim of the general introduction to the _nova
methodus_ of Leibnitz, where the study of Greek is recommended solely
for the sake of the Greek Testament (1666). Meanwhile, Ratichius (d.
1635) had in vain pretended to teach Hebrew, Greek and Latin in the
space of six months (1612), but he had the merit of maintaining that the
study of a language should begin with the study of an author. Comenius
(d. 1671) had proposed to teach Latin by drilling his pupils in a
thousand graduated phrases distributed over a hundred instructive
chapters, while the Latin authors were banished because of their
difficulty and their "paganism" (1631). One of the catchwords of the day
was to insist on a knowledge of _things_ instead of a knowledge of
_words_, on "realism" instead of "verbalism."