The earlier views of the young instructor had been well received; but as he developed these later ideas his audiences became alarmed, and "before long," he tells us, "I was left alone in my lectureroom with my Grotius."

Yet not discouraged. Having given two years to study, thought, and travel, he began again, and now drew large audiences. The inert mass of German law began, under his hands, to throb with a new life.

At first his zeal and ability.carried all before him; and, despite the grumblings of his opponents, he was in 1685 admitted to membership in the learned society which edited the literary journal of the University, the Acta Eruditorum.

But matters became speedily worse for him. The young instructor's facility in lecturing and publishing was as great as his zeal, and his every book and every lecture seemed to arouse new hatred in the older race of theologians and jurists. Enemies beset him on all sides; now and then skirmishes were won against him, resulting in condemnation of this or that book or prohibition of this or that course of lectures.

But for his real genius, he would have lost the battle entirely. He committed errors in taste, errors in tact, errors in statement, errors in method, more than enough to ruin a man simply of great talent; but he was possessed of more than talent; of more than genius.1

For there was in him a deep, earnest purpose, a force which obstacles only in

1 For a striking example of Thomasius's errors in taste and method, see the very curious and comical statement of a speech before the professors and students of Leipsic in 1694, dedicated to the Elector Frederick III, in Tholuck: Vorgeschichte des Rationalismus, second part, - Das kirchliche Leben des siebenzehnten Jahrhunderts, first edition, Berlin, 1861, pp. 71 et seq.; and for other examples, see pages following. For an open confession of what he considered as too great severity in various cases, see especially p. 72. For complaints by others against his too great sharpness and severity, see pp. 74 et seq.

creased; and so, as preparatory to his lectures of 1688, came the startling announcement that they were to be in the spoken language of his country. This brought on a crisis. To his enemies it seemed insult added to injury. Heretofore Thomasius had developed the ideas of Grotius and Pufendorf; this was bad enough; but now, his opponents declared that he purposed to disgrace the University and degrade the Faculty. In vain did Thomasius take pains to make. his ⚫ views understood. In vain did he extol the Greek and Latin classics; in vain did he show the great advantages which France and other nations had reaped from the cultivation of their own languages; in vain did he show that lecturing in Latin was conducive to the reworking of old thoughts rather than to the development of new; that a flexible modern language is the best medium in which new thought can be developed: all in vain.

The opposition became more and more determined, but he stood none the less firmly. More and more he labored to clear away barbarisms and to bring in a better philosophy; and while he continued to deliver some of his lectures and write some of his books in Latin, he persisted in using German in those lectures and books which appealed to his audiences more directly and fully. This brought more and more intrigues, more and more pressure: every sort of authority, lay and ecclesiastic, was besought to remove him.

As we have seen, he had been one of the editors of a Latin literary journal; he now established a literary journal in German, the first of any real value ever known. Up to that time newspapers in Germany were petty sheets giving mere summaries of news; Thomasius was the first to found a German literary journal in any true sense of the word.2

2 For a brief but excellent statement of the relation of this new journalism to the advancement of German thought, see Kuno Francke, Social Forces in German Literature, p. 176 (note).

Not only did he give up the old language of literary criticism, but he relinquished its old paths. The time-honored methods in criticism were simple. They were largely those of a mutual admiration society: each professor sounding in sonorous Latin the glories of his sect or his clique, and showing in pungent Latin the futility of all others. With all such, Thomasius made havoc, discussed the works of his colleagues and of others impartially; asked no favors and showed none. He was the sworn foe of intolerance, of abuses rooted in prejudice, of all mere formulas and learned jargon.

Nor did he confine himself to that easiest and cheapest of all things, destructive criticism; he determined not merely to criticise, but to create, not merely to destroy, but to build; he showed, distinctly, power to develop new good things in place of old bad things.

This work of his, then, while apparently revolutionary, was really evolutionary: he opened German literature to the influences of its best environment; he stripped off its thick, tough coatings and accretions of pedantry, sophistry, and conventionalism, and brought it into clean and stimulating contact with the best life of Germany and of Europe.

While opposing the unfit use of the ancient languages, he never ceased efforts to improve his own language. Luther had, indeed, given it a noble form by his translation of the Bible; but pedantry was still too powerful: the vernacular was despised. All care was given to Latin. At sundry schools of high repute children were not only trained to speak Latin, but whipped if they spoke anything else. Learned schoolmasters considered it disgraceful to speak their own language, or to allow their pupils to speak it. The result was that the German language had become a jargon. Even Thomasius himself never fully freed his style from the effect of his early teaching: much as he did to improve German literature by calling attention to the more lucid French models,

The evil was deep-seated. Candidates for degrees in his time discussed such subjects as the weight of the grape clusters which the spies brought out of the Promised Land: one professor lectured twenty-four years on the first chapter of Isaiah; another lectured an equal time on the first ten chapters of Jeremiah; still another gave thirteen years to an explanation of the Psalms; Gessner, the philologist, gave forty lectures upon one word in Aristotle's Rhetoric.3

To all the objections of Thomasius against this sort of learning, his opponents had an easy answer: they declared his arguments shallow, and himself a charlatan. But he committed still another crime. Spener having continued his efforts to bring peace between the warring factions in the church and to arouse Christian effort, Thomasius defended him, made common cause with him, and, indeed, for a considerable time, became milder in character and utterance. Hence it was that, though for his views on the source of public law he had been called an "atheist," he was now called, for his tolerant views, a “pietist."

And soon came another charge, even worse. A Danish court preacher, Masius, had put forth a treatise to prove 1 See curious examples in Räumer, Geschichte der Pädegogik, cited in Klemperer.

2 As to Thomasius's plan to give something better than the usual subjects of study, see Dernburg, Thomasius und die Stiftung der Universität Halle, pp. 8 et seq.

3 See Klemperer's citations from various authorities.

Lutheranism the form of religion most favorable to princely power, that no other religion taught so plainly the divine authority of princely government, the necessity of passive obedience on the part of the governed, the absolute authority conferred on government directly from God, and without any necessary consent of the people. No argument could appeal more strongly to the multitude of princelings, great and small, who then ruled every corner of Germany with rods of iron.

But these statements and arguments Thomasius, in the regular course of his work as professor and journalist, brought under criticism; stigmatized them as an attempt to curry favor with the ruling class; and finally declared that, although the powers that be are ordained of God, various rights on the part of the governed must be supposed. This threw the opposing theologians into new spasms. They had previously, without much regard for consistency, declared him an atheist and pietist; they now declared him guilty of treason, the Danish Government made a solemn complaint to the Government of Saxony, and Thomasius's book was burned by a Danish hangman, while the Elector of Saxony, the palace clique, and the authorities of the church at Dresden, were more loudly than ever besought to remove him.

Against all this he stood firm. But at last fortune seemed to desert him. His love of justice plunged him into apparent

ruin. The Duke of Sachsen-Seitz had wished to marry a daughter of the Elector of Brandenburg. The reasons for the marriage were many and weighty. The alliance was a happy one for the two states, and the prince and princess loved each other; but Saxony was Lutheran, and Brandenburg Calvinistic: the marriage was, therefore, denounced from the leading Lutheran pulpits. Against these Thomasius began another struggle. On grounds of simple justice and of public right, and of opposition to intolerance, he favored the marriage. Committees were now appointed to examine into his utterances and opinions. The Philosophic Faculty of Leipsic made formal charges against him before the Royal Court at Dresden, beseeching the authorities to stop his lectures and to allow him to print nothing which had not received the sanction of the censure. This led to a catastrophe: a warrant was issued for his arrest, and, as treason was one of the crimes charged, he took the wisest course left him,- - he shook from his feet forever the dust of Saxony, fled by night from Leipsic, and sought refuge in Halle, under the sway of the Elector of Brandenburg.

Thus, in 1690, apparently ended all his opportunities to better his country. At the age of thirty-five years, he saw his enemies jubilant; every cause for which he had struggled lost; himself considered, among friends and enemies alike, as discredited and ridiculous.

Letters... are of several kinds. First, there are those which are not letters at all, as letters patent, letters dimissory, letters enclosing bills

letters of marque, and letters generally, which are in no wise letters of mark. [Lowell's The Biglow Papers, First Series, No. VII.]

"ODD people write odd letters," was the unanswerable assertion of that else

forgotten essayist, Bishop Thorold,-forgotten, even though his Presence of Christ went through twenty editions in his lifetime. Be this as it may, it is true of all of us that the letter represents the man, odd or even. It is, indeed, more absolutely the man, in one sense, than he himself is, for the man himself is inevitably changing, beyond his own control, from moment to moment, from birth to death; but the letter, once written, is an instantaneous photograph and stays forever unchanged. Litera scripta manet. If sincere, it is irrevocable, if insincere it is equally so; and however artfully executed, it may be read between the lines, some time or other, and its hidden meaning unveiled. Let us by all means, therefore, devote a few pages to the odd letters.

The following letter is one of a class which every American journalist or magazinist, whose name becomes tolerably familiar to the public, may reasonably expect to receive every month or two. This arrived many years ago; and the daughter of this writer may well be addressing, by this time, some younger author in an equally confiding spirit. No other nationality, perhaps, would produce such a letter, and yet this obviously came from a thoroughly honest and simple soul whose frankness was its own defense.

OHIO, 10, 27, '84.

DEAR SIR, I am one of your girl admirers, I am! I know you're sedate and VOL. 95- NO. 4

grandfatherly and such an announcement wont startle you a bit! . . . We have one of your books in the circulating library in town, we always have read your articles— when I wore a bib I'd read them in Our Young Folks. . . . .

Oh, I did forget the object of my call I want to be reading a good history of Ireland and Scotland this winter. Please suggest what is best. I want nothing dry nor pokey; whatever you approve will suit me 'cause you're so folksy! I would enjoy Irish legends and superstitions.

When my ship comes in I'm going to Europe, ah, thereby hangs a tale! my folks smile whenever the subject comes up. Once upon a time I nearly got a legacy! Why did n't I get it? A childless old widower in his dotage made a will giving to four girls his gilders. I was one of 'em, just as he was about to "shuffle off" a little widow, bright and black eyed, inveigled the widdy man into a marriage and she got my "noble six hundred!"

And since he died this pesky widow, this scheming Vivian is on the track again a-trying to get into the good graces of one of my admirers !

The legacy business was a surprise to us girls and it did no harm, we all have homes and plenty, so I'll just go on being smiling and help rheumatic-y old men in wheel chairs across rough places in pavements and will get to Europe on my own cash. . . .

Please find enclosed a stamp for reply and don't be shocked at my wild Western ways

Your Girl friend.

Another letter, proceeding from a different temperament and from a much remoter source, indicates the graver and still more daring spirit which was ready, even

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in what was then almost wilderness, to write Gibbon's Roman Empire or any other task demanding such a library as scarcely Washington or New York or Boston could then afford.

DAKOTA, Nov. 13, 1886.

DEAR SIR, In one of the Chicago papers (I have mislaid the article) I saw you quoted as saying that the field of literary work was almost, or quite, destitute of women who could write a really scholarly article on any given, or assigned subject. I may be unequal to the task, and I have not a Library of any size to consult on such subjects, but I would like to try. I am capable of study and have an easy pen. A little direction may be worth a good deal to me.

Very Resp❜ly.

But from an Eastern metropolis itself came this more practical appeal with a view to business only.

NEW YORK CITY, Feb. 25, 1885. DEAR SIR, I am desirous of securing a humerous lecture for a lady to deliver through N. Y. State & possibly some in the West. I saw the notice of your lecture "New England Vagabond" in the Boston Papers & write to ask you if the same can be secured. If so upon what terms. I conclude from the title that it is humerous; is it not? Yours truly.

Then comes an appeal from the outer edge of literature, with the advantage of a foreign atmosphere and a picturesque name. Having afterwards met the author, I can testify to his fine personal appearance and to a power of gesture such as to suggest the necessity of those strictly pocketed hands demanded by his "pantomimeless friends." Alas! what budding orator fails to find himself liable to repression by such friendship?

Jan. 15th, 1900. MY DEAR SIR, I beg of you as a stranger, that I may be the recipient of

your encouragement in my efforts to pronounce the words of Shakespeare.

I am beginning the study of some of the works of the Master and that from a dramatic standpoint, and "I see in them more than mortal knowledge."

I write you sir as a patron of learning and as a helper of young men that I may be given the opportunity to, if possible, give a reading of one hour's duration at your home for the sum of $10.

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Although being of a Syrian origin and have the Arabic for my mother tongue, yet "I have a mind that pressages me such thrift that I should questionless be fortunate," and I "Do now feel the future in the instant."

Permit me to state that I have the idea to excute after two years study six of the master-pieces of the Master word for word and to reproduce the same with the aid of illustrations upon the screen and if possible to use moving characters to be taken from casts set for the purpose. This would in itself be an atraction in making Shakespeare more popular even with the use of my voice to speak the parts of all characters as they appear on the canvas.

At present I have two plays almost assimilated and registred in my memory and from these I would use portions if privileged by you some evening in the future (near?).

I think I am possessed with the requisits, that of voice and the dramatic instinct, coupled with a pair of strong lungs to propell the necessary atmosphere to the character living in my mind, whether it be that of Hamlet, Shylock, Portia or that of a clown.

I am told that my physical make up is very responsive to my imagination by way of movement and action, and it is so much so that I have to pocket my hands inorder to conform myself to the pantomimeless friends here.

I crave again your pardon for obtruding myself on your kindness, and with best wishes and Salaam

I am most respectfully yours.