Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/170

158 HISTORY OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE But the Humanist studies owed their success at Vienna pre-eminently to the services of the gifted Conrad Celtes, who was invited in 1497 by Maximilian himself to be professor at the university. In his thoroughly Greek materialistic views of life and his epicurean habits Celtes was not in harmony with the principles of the severe Christian schools of Humanists, but rather with the young progressive section of Germany. This brought down on him the strongly expressed opprobrium of the lofty-minded Charity Pirkheimer for having allowed himself to be carried away by the heathen classics. But there remains to him the praise of untiring zeal with which he laboured incessantly to awaken in all parts of Germany an interest in learning, and for having done so much both by word and by writing to develop the study of national history. He could boast of having travelled to the sources of all the principal rivers of Germany, of having seen her best cities, of having visited all her universities, and of having gained a better knowledge of her people than anyone before him had ever possessed. He had intended to sum up the results of these travels and of his long years of research in an exhaustive history of Germany and the Germans, but in the midst of his labours he died in 1508, at the age of forty-nine. Many treasures of ancient literature, such as the works of Eoswitha, the nun of Gendersheim, and the historical poem ' Ligurinus,' were rescued by him from oblivion. On this poem he gave lectures at Vienna. He was the first German professor who taught the history of the world in a connected and systematic manner at a university, and whose treatment of German history was of a nature to arouse an interest in the past