LEOPOLD VON RANKE 253
the Popes — was more completely based on the Relations than any of his other works save the Ottoman and Spanish Mon- archies. He himself realized the influence upon his work of his materials. "Der Stoff brachte die Form mit sich," he writes in his autobiography. ^
But Ranke's work was epoch-making, not only in the development of criticism and in the revelation of sources, but also in teaching. He was t he grea test of historical teachers, although never a very popular lecturer. 2 He pos- sessed, however, in a rare degree the faculty of stimulating and drawing out the native powers of his pupils. Through the influence of his teaching and writing, and the influence of his pupils and their pupils unto the third and fourth generation, the study and teaching of history have been transformed and vivified to an extraordinary degree. What historical teacher has ever been able like him, at 88 years of age, to say of his early work so truthfully that one feels no sense of boasting : " What we then began (i, e. , in his early seminar), the seed which we planted, is now grown to be a great tree, so that the birds of the heaven lodge in its branches. "3
The most distinctive and valuable contribution of Ranke to advanced historical teaching was the development of the seminary or practice work. Ranke founded the seminary method in the teaching of history in much the same sense that he discovered the Venetian Relations. Although not in either case wholly a pioneer, he was practically such.* While
1 Page 70. Compare the remark in the preface of the Gesch. der rom. und germ. Volker, 7, " Aus Absicht und Stoff entsteht die Form." His explanation of the fact that his German History during the Reformation was less attractive in style than the History of the Popes was that the German History was based, to a considerable degree, on crabbed reports of the proceedings of Diets and other material much cruder in form than Venetian Relations.
2 As a lecturer he preferred subjects in general history and to cover a long period. The largest attendance he ever had was in the winter of 1841-42, when he lectured on recent history; the maximum attendance then was 153. Dove, art. " Ranke," in Allgemeine deutsche Biog., 258.
8 Page 469.
- "Wilken, for example, the historian of the Crusades, had a seminary in
