still lying in the dust of the
Roman plains, looking with pious enthusiasm at the towers of the holy
city appearing on the verge of the horizon. In the mean while we may
learn from the experiences of a Latin scholar, what was working in the
souls of the people.

Frederick Mecum (Latinized into Myconius[22]) was the son of honest
citizens of Lichtenfelds, in Upper Franconia, and was born in 1491.
When thirteen years of age, he went to the Latin school of the then
flourishing city of Annaberg, where he experienced what we propose
giving in his own words. In 1510 he went into a monastery, and as a
Franciscan he was one of the first, most zealous, and faithful
followers of the Wittenberg professors. He left his order, became a
preacher at the new church in Thuringia, and finally pastor and
superintendent at Gotha, where he established the Reformation, and died
in 1546. The connecting link between him and Luther was of a very
peculiar nature; he was not only his most intimate friend in many
relations of private life, but there was a poetry in his connection
with him which spread a halo round his whole life. Seven years before
Luther began the Reformation, Myconius saw in a dream the vision of
that great man, who calmed the doubts of his excited heart; enlightened
by his dream, the faithful, pious German discovered in him the great
friend of every future hour. But another circumstance gives us an
interest in the narrator. However unlike, this gentle, delicately
organized man may appear to his daring friend, there was a striking
similarity in the youthful life of both, and much which is unknown to
us of Luther's youth may be explained in what Myconius relates of his
own. Both were poor scholars from a Latin school; both were driven by
their inward struggles and youthful enthusiasm into a monastery, and
found there only new doubts, greater struggles, and years of torment
and anxious uncertainty instead of that peace for which they so
passionately longed. To both was the shameless Tetzel the rock of
offence, which stirred up their minds, and determined the whole course
of their future life: finally, both died in the same year,--Myconius
seven weeks after Luther, having five years before, been restored to
life from a mortal illness by Luther's letter of invocation.[23] Few of
Frederick Myconius' works have been printed: besides theological
essays, he wrote a chronicle of his own time in German, in which he
describes with the gr