Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/77

EDUCATION AND THE OLDER HUMANISTS 65 fundamentally opposed to each other. They differed also in their respective attitudes towards the classics, the younger school too often regarding them from the mere standpoint of outward beauty of form and lan- guage, while the Humanists of the older school were always striving to acquire a more thorough grasp of the entire life of the ancients. The younger school, moreover, altogether despised their own native tongue and literature ; while the older school valued the classics in great measure as a means of giving the German people an insight into its own past and of im- proving the German language. We find all these characteristics of the older Ger- man Humanists already strongly accentuated in Agricola, the actual founder of the school. Eudolph Agricola, born at Baflo, near Groningen, in 1442, had made himself master of all the classical scholarship of his day. He was called a second Virgil. Even in Italy, where he lived from 1473 to 1480, he was wondered at for the fluency, correctness, and purity which he had acquired in the Latin language. The de- sire of his heart was that Germany should attain to such perfection of culture and scholarship that ' Latium itself should not surpass it in Latinity.' Wim- pheling recounts in his praise that he insisted on having the ancient historians translated into German, with German explanatory notes appended, in order that the people might make acquaintance with them, and also as a means of improving and beautifying the mother- tongue. 1 So little did his classic studies render him in- different to his own language, that he composed songs in German, which he was wont to sin£ to the accom- 1 De Arte Imprcssoria, fol. 17 ; Eeuchlin, pp. 130, 67. VOL. I. F