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The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America and Europe by James Kendall Hosmer
page 59 of 258 (22%)
the Neckar make so narrow, collected then, as now, a fair concourse of
bounding youth. One can easily fancy how, when the prototypes of
the trim Burschen of to-day stepped out in their representation, the
applause sounded across to the vineyards about the Heiligenberg and
Hirschgasse, and how now and then a knight and a dame from the court
of the Kurfürst came down the Schlossberg to see it all. What Reuchlin
began, came by no means to a speedy end. In the Jesuit seminaries in
Germany, in Italy too, and elsewhere, as the Reformation came on, I
find the boys were acting plays. This feature in the school was
held out as an attraction to win students; and in Prague the Fathers
themselves wrote dramas to satirise the Protestants, introducing
Luther as the comic figure. But what occurred in the Protestant world
was more noteworthy. As the choral singing of the schoolboys affected
in an important way the development of music, so the school-plays had
much to do with the development of the drama. Read Gervinus to see how
for a century or two it was the schools and universities that remained
true to a tolerably high standard, while in the world at large all
nobler ideals were under eclipse. It was jocund Luther himself who
took it under his especial sanction, as he did the fiddle and the
dance, in his sweet large-heartedness finding Scriptural precedents
for it, and encouraging the youths who came trooping to Wittenberg to
relieve their wrestling with Aristotle and the dreary controversy with
an occasional play. Melancthon, too, gave the practice encouragement,
until not only Wittenberg, but the schools of Saxony in general, and
Thuringia, whose hills were in sight, surpassed all the countries of
Germany in their attention to plays. In Leipsic, Erfurt, and Magdeburg
comedies were regularly represented before the schoolmasters. But
it was at the University of Strassburg, even at the time when the
unsmiling Calvin was seeking asylum there, that the dramatic life of
the German seminaries found a splendid culmination. Yearly, in the
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