Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/317

PROSE AND POPULAR READING 305 degree by diligent study of the fifteenth-century prose writers and by his intercourse with the people, we may fairly assert that in the sixteenth, not to say the seven- teenth, century, as compared with the fifteenth, prose composition of all sorts was decidedly retrogressive ; and that in place of the earlier simple, natural, fluent writing, a sort of clumsy, jerky, stuttering and stam- mering had come into fashion, which cannot be read without a feeling of pain. 1 German prose of the fifteenth century is not to be excelled in vigour and purity, and by reason of this vigour it has survived to this day as an imperishable monument of uncorrupted and unadulterated German national character. 1 This conclusion was arrived at by the great ' Germanist ' Franz Pfeiffer in his researches. See his Germania, iii. p. 409 ; see also Kurz, pp. 742, 743. VOL. I. X