ting. Their importance is the same in the literary and in
the political history of Germany. The intellectual and moral character of
a nation is formed in schools and universities; and those who educate a
people have always been its real masters, though they may go by a more
modest name. Under the Roman Empire public schools had been supported by
the government, both at Rome and in the chief towns of the Provinces. We
know of their existence in Gaul and parts of Germany. With the decline of
the central authority, the salaries of the grammarians and rhetors in the
Provinces ceased to be paid, and the pagan gymnasia were succeeded by
Christian schools, attached to episcopal sees and monasteries. Whilst the
clergy retained their vigor and efficiency, their schools were powerful
engines for spreading a half clerical and half classical culture in
Germany. During the Crusades, when ecclesiastical activity and learning
declined very rapidly, we hear of French tutors at the castles of the
nobility, and classical learning gave way to the superficial polish of a
chivalrous age. And when the nobility likewise relapsed into a state of
savage barbarism, new schools were wanted, and they were founded by the
towns, the only places where, during the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, we see any evidence of a healthy political life. The first town
schools are mentioned in the beginning of the fourteenth century, and they
were soon followed by the high schools and universities. The University of
Prague was founded in 1348; Vienna, 1366; Heidelberg, 1386; Erfurt, 1392;
Leipzig, 1408; Basle, 1460; Tuebingen, 1477; Mainz, 1482. These
universities are a novel feature in the history of German and of European
civilization. They are not ecclesiastical seminaries, not restricted to
any particular class of society; they are national institutions, open to
the rich and the poor, to the knight, the clerk, the citizen. They are
real universities of learning: they profess to teach all branches of
knowledge,--theology and law, medicine and philosophy. They contain the
first practical acknowledgment of the right of every subject to the
highest education, and through it to the highest offices in Church and
State. Neither Greece nor Rome had known such institutions: neither the
Church nor the nobility, during the days of their political supremacy,
were sufficiently impressed with the duty which they owed to the nation at
large to provide such places of liber