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Johann Pfefferkorn, a converted Ortuinus Gratius, a supporter Jew, ex scelerato Judæo sceleratissimus Christianus, as Erasmus called him, opened a campaign against the literature of his own race. He was a vulgar, esurient knave, who, as is not altogether unknown among Jews, thought it expedient and profitable to insult the whole of Jewry. Instantly he found a band of zealous allies among the Dominicans, and when the famous scholar, Reuchlin, took up the challenge on the behalf of Humane learning, the quarrel assumed a far wider scope. The combatants fought for a larger cause than the learning of the Jews. On Reuchlin's side were ranged the friends of scholarship and the Humanities; on the other side fought pedants, monks, and all the bitter enemies of decency and learning. Pfefferkorn himself, who, as Mr Stokes says, was a kind of Titus Oates, capable of stirring up more strife in the world than his very meagre abilities warranted, speedily disappeared into the background, and left the field open for a sharp encounter between ignorance and wisdom, between darkness and light. At one stage of the warfare Reuchlin had published a work which he entitled 'Clarorum Virorum Epistolæ,' a collection of letters addressed to himself, and this collection it was which inspired Ulrich von Hutten and Crotus Rubianus, two champions of soholarship, to one of the most brilliant satires ever penned. The Letters of the Obscure are addressed for the most part to

of Pfefferkorn, a pedant of De-
venter, who by an accident has
won an unwelcome immor-
tality. A man is known by
his associates, and a more ig-
norant, drunken, and profligate
set than those who address
their master with terms of
adulation could not be found.
The satirist, without ruth or
pity, makes the dolts of his
own imagining expose all the
vices and all the stupidities
common to monkishness and
ignorance. They are allowed,
these dolts, as Bishop Creighton
says, "to tell their own story,
to wander round the narrow
circle of antiquated prejudices
which they mistook for ideas,
display their grossness, their
vulgarity, their absence of aim,
their laborious indolence, their
lives unrelieved by any touch
of nobility." The book had an
instant success. It won ad-
mirers in every camp of learn-
ing. Only Erasmus stood aloof
from praise, and he stood aloof
because he was wrongly taxed
with the authorship of the
book, and because his level
temperament disapproved of
its violence. There were, more-
over, pedants innumerable whom
the irony of the work escaped,
and who really believed that
the obscure ones were fighting
a serious battle on their behalf.
"The learned are tickled by
their humour,' wrote Sir
Thomas More of the 'Epistolæ,'
"while the unlearned deem
their teachings
worth. When we laugh they
think we do but deride their
style; this they do not defend,
but they declare that all faults

of serious

are compensated by the weight of the matter, and that the rough scabbard contains a a brilliant blade!" The authors could not have wished for a greater triumph. Sir Thomas More made a shrewd prophecy concerning the fate of the work. "Would that the book," said he, "had appeared under another title! I verily believe that in a hundred years the dolts would not perceive the nose turned up at them-though larger than the snout of the rhinoceros!" This is precisely what happened. The last editor of the Epistolæ,' before Mr Stokes took them in hand, printed them as serious contributions

to the history of learning; and Steele, as Mr Stokes tells us, wondered in 'The Tatler' that "fellows could be awake, and utter such incoherent conceptions." However, the authors of the 'Epistolæ' did their work in their own way: they struck a blow at ignorance from which the pedants and the monks never recovered; they made clear the path for the satire of Rabelais; and they proved that the best weapon wherewith to combat folly is laughter loud and long. Would that there were in our midst some Ulrich von Hutten, who would pour the ridicule of his contempt upon the demagogues of to-day!

AS OTHERS SEE US.

AT a moment when there is about to be determined an issue in our national career graver than any known in the lifetime of the oldest among us, it can only do good to pause and take stock of ourselves as we appear to an impartial observer, a man of another nation.

'England and the English from an American Point of View' was published early in the present year, before the great upheaval was upon us. There is evidence in the book that its author has lived much in England, and has studied our social conditions from many points of view. He acknowledges that he is deeply in debt to the English for many delightful friendships, for generous and unstinted hospitality, and for teaching him much. He repeatedly says that he is not criticising, but only offering his impressions and trying to explain the facts he has observed. But none the less he hits hard and does not mince his language, whether he is speaking of the dress of English ladies, of the food of British people, of the streets of London after dusk, of the compromise of a Cathedral preacher, or of a Cabinet Minister.

Who, he asks, are these English? When Cæsar and

his legions came to Britain fifty-five years before the birth of Christ, they found our island inhabited by an Iberian race from South-Western Europe, of whom the Basque is to-day the best and last representative. The Romans occupied the land for more than 450 years, and then retired to the continent of Europe, leaving traces of their occupation in roads and fortified camps, and little else.

The Britons re

mained; neither their language nor their laws nor their customs had been changed by the Romans. But now from NorthWestern Germany began another invasion. Jutes came for adventure and for booty; Saxons, because their own country was overcrowded and they wanted land to settle on. These Saxons were an agricultural people of the peasant class; they gradually pushed their way over the land, thrusting back the Britons into Wales and across the water into Brittany; they were troubled by Angles and by Danes, who landed and settled on the East Coast, where alone the Danes have left an appreciable mark, but elsewhere they held their own. held their own. They were independent farmers, they admitted a leader, and came to his aid at times of their own choosing. When they had

1 England and the English from an American Point of View. By Price Collier. Printed by the Scribner Press, New York, U.S.A. Duckworth & Co., London. 1909.

public meetings to discuss important affairs, they gradually grew more and more into the habit of leaving these matters to those who had leisure and brains. Out of this habit grew the Witenagemot, or Meeting of Wise Men. They appointed men of wealth and leisure to mete out justice. They were a law-abiding people, with a rooted distaste for over-much government. They wanted independence, they wanted not to be meddled with, but, as Tacitus wrote, they were always ready to a man to take up arms.

Then came the Normans; but just as had been the case with the Angles and the Danes, the Saxons in time swallowed them up, and Saxon customs, Saxon laws, and Saxon institutions prevailed in the long-run. These Saxons would have none of Feudalism, and the result was Magna Charta; for if it was the Norman barons who shook off personal rule by the king, it was the Saxon spirit imbued in them which prevailed, and it was the Saxon people who obtained freedom. It is from Magna Charta that the House of Lords dates its existence. This is what our American writer says:"The present House of Lords itself is the direct result of the Saxon's unwillingness to bother with government, and his willingness to leave such matters to those of most leisure and most wealth, and therefore, in all probability, to those of most capacity and most experi

ence in such matters. It was, and is, the common-sense view of government, as over against the theoretical view.” These, then, are the English, a people originally agricultural, industrious, lovers of freedom, above all not wanting to be bothered with governing, but choosing their ablest, their wealthiest, their most leisured men to govern for them. "They are Saxons, who love the land, who love their liberty, and whose sole claim to genius is their common-sense.

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Years have rolled on,-has the Saxon race retained its characteristics?

In the chapter headed "First Impressions" the earliest impression is that of "just slow-moving, unchanging, confident bulk." Dealing with the question of our food, our American says: "What you want is not refused you, but what they have and like is gradually forced upon you.

Thus they govern their colonies." English servants are "fixed, immovable, unconcerned about other careers, undisturbed by hazy ambitions, and insistent upon their privileges, as are all other Englishmen.

They hold themselves at a high value, assert that value, and wherever and whenever possible, take all they can get. This is the British way, an impressive and an eminently successful way." And he says they may laugh at all the turmoil of trades unions, for without union the wages of servants have increased out

of all proportion to the increase of wages in other occupations in the last fifteen years.

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The next impression is that "this is a land of men, ruled by men, obedient to the ways and comforts and prejudices of men, not women. He contrasts England with America in this respect. He thinks that in a large majority of cases the amounts allowed to English women to dress on 'are on a scale that can only be called mean"; but he says, "This England has become the great Empire she is, because she is a man's country, and the expenditure permitted to the women is only one of the minor results of this."

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their rewards early and often. As a consequence, England has had for hundreds of years an honourroll of mighty men at the helm of her affairs.

"England has never had a social upheaval which has driven out her old families, and in consequence the public service commands an ability, and on the whole is conducted with an integrity, due to the fine feeling of a class long trained in genuine patriotism such as no other country can boast of."

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Our author finds the Englishman self-contained, with horror of interfering with other people's business, indifferent to foreigners or even colonists of his own race, without sympathy with or comprehension of them, or wish to understand them unless there is something to be got out of them. As to his attitude to Americans who have settled in England, and live luxuriously there, the Englishman "looks upon them first as people who have recognised his superiority, and therefore prefer his society, but secondly and always as renegades, as people who have shirked their duty as Americans.'

"England is not only a man's country, but the English man is pre-eminently a man's man. The prizes here go to the soldiers, the sailors, the statesmen, the colonisers, the winners of new territory and the rulers over them, the travellers and explorers, the great churchmen and successful schoolmasters, to those in short with masculine minds and bodies. The feminine, the effeminate, and the Semitic prowess is rewarded, it is true-more of late years than ever before but it is not the ideal of England, in our author's the nation. It has been opinion, is a land, and Engwittily said that a states- lishmen the people, of comman is a dead politician; promise, which "some people but in England this does call hypocrisy, some pharisanot apply. The great ism." The chapter headed statesmen or the leading "The Land of Compromise" is politicians, as one may well worth study. Our naplease to call them, receive tional expenditure on drink,

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