contact, at all events close, with classic antiquity. Her temperament
was no doubt hostile; the Reformation, that is, the impassioned adoption
of a primitive unadulterated Christianity conservative and directly
opposed to antiquity whether pagan or philosophical, added to the
repugnance. However that may be, the fact remains: Germany enjoyed no
renaissance.

LUTHER.--Also in the sixteenth century in Germany, as in France in the
fourteenth century, there was only popular poetry, and all the prose is
German, all reformist, all moralising, and has little or practically no
echo of antiquity. Luther, by his translation of the Bible into the
vulgar tongue, by his _prefaces_ to each book of the Bible, in his
polemical writings (_The Papacy and its Members_, _The Papacy Elevated at
Rome by the Devil_, etc.), by his _Sermons and Letters_, gave to Teutonic
thought a direction which long endured, and to Teutonic prose a solidity,
purity, sobriety, and vigour which exercised an immense influence on
human minds.

THE REFORMERS.--Following Luther, Zwingli, Hutten, Eberling, Melanchthon
(but in Latin), Erasmus (most frequently in Latin but sometimes in
French) spread the new doctrine or doctrines in relation thereto.

ERASMUS; ALBERT DUeRER; GOTTSCHED.--An exception must be made about
Erasmus in what has just been observed. With a very unfettered mind,
often as much in opposition to the side of Luther as to the side of Rome,
and also prone to attack the pure humanists who styled themselves
Ciceronians, Erasmus was a humanist, an impassioned student of ancient
letters, so that he has one foot in the Renaissance and one in reform,
and withal possessed a very original brain, and was, from every aspect,
"ultra-modern."