The Complete Short Works of Georg Ebers. Georg Ebers
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the others also:
"In better days rope-dancing was the profession of yonder poor, coughing creature. Now, after a severe accident, she is dragging herself through life on one foot. I once knew her, for I succeeded in saving her from terrible disgrace."
"And," replied Wilibald Pirckheimer, "we would rather show kindness a second and a third time to any one on whom we have be stowed a favour than to render it once to a person from whom we have received one. This is my own experience. But the wise man must guard against nothing more carefully than to exceed moderation in his charity. How easily, when Caius sees Cnejus lavish gold where silver or copper would serve, he thinks of Martial's apt words: 'Who gives great gifts, expects great gifts again.'—[Martial, Epigram 5, 59, 3.]—Do not misunderstand me. What could yonder poor thing bestow that would please even a groom? But the eyes of suspicion scan even the past. I have often seen you open your purse, friend Lienhard, and this is right. Whoever hath ought to give, and my dead mother used to say that: 'No one ever became a beggar by giving at the proper time.'"
"And life is gladdened by what one gives to another," remarked Conrad Peutinger, the learned Augsburg city clerk, who valued his Padua title of doctor more than that of an imperial councillor. "It applies to all departments. Don't allow yourself to regret your generosity, friend Lienhard. 'Nothing becomes man better than the pleasure of giving,' says Terentius.—[Terenz. Ad. 360]—Who is more liberal than the destiny which adorns the apple tree that is to bear a hundred fruits, with ten thousand blossoms to please our eyes ere it satisfies our appetite?"
"To you, if to any one, it gives daily proof of liberality in both learning and the affairs of life," Herr Wilibald assented.
"If you will substitute 'God, our Lord,' for 'destiny,' I agree with you," observed the Abbot of St. AEgidius in Nuremberg.
The portly old prelate nodded cordially to Dr. Peutinger as he spoke. The warm, human love with which he devoted himself to the care of souls in his great parish consumed the lion's share of his time and strength. He spent only his leisure hours in the study of the ancient writers, in whom he found pleasure, and rejoiced in the work of the humanists without sharing their opinions.
"Yes, my dear Doctor," he continued in his deep voice, in a tone of the most earnest conviction, "if envy were ever pardonable, he who presumed to feel it toward you might most speedily hope to find forgiveness. There is no physical or mental gift with which the Lord has not blessed you, and to fill the measure to overflowing, he permitted you to win a beautiful and virtuous wife of noble lineage."
"And allowed glorious daughters to grow up in your famous home," cried little Dr. Eberbach, waving his wineglass enthusiastically. "Who has not heard of Juliane Peutinger, the youngest of humanists, but no longer one of the least eminent, who, when a child only four years old, addressed the Emperor Maximilian in excellent Latin. But when, as in the child Juliane, the wings of the intellect move so powerfully and so prematurely, who would not think of the words of the superb Ovid: 'The human mind gains victories more surely than lances and arrows.'"
But, ere he had finished the verse which, like many another Latin one, he mingled with his German words, he noticed Lienhard Groland eagerly motioning to him to stop. The latter knew only too well what had not yet reached the ears of Eberbach in Vienna. The marvellous child, whose precocious learning he had just extolled as a noble gift of Providence to the father, was no longer among the living. Her bright eyes had closed ere she reached maidenhood.
Dr. Eberbach, in painful embarrassment, tried to apologize for his heedlessness, but the Augsburg city clerk, with a friendly gesture, endeavoured to soothe his young fellow-scholar.
"It brought the true nature of happiness very vividly before all our eyes," he remarked with a faint sigh. "In itself it is not lasting. A second piece of good fortune is needed to maintain the first. Mine was indeed great and beautiful enough. But we will let the dead rest. What more have you heard concerning the first books of the Annales of Tacitus, said to have been discovered in the Corvey monastery? If the report should be verified——"
Here Eberbach, delighted to find an opportunity to afford the honoured man whom he had unwittingly grieved a little pleasure, eagerly interrupted. Hurriedly thrusting his hand into the breast of his black doublet, he drew forth several small sheets on which he had succeeded in copying the beginning of the precious new manuscript, and handed them to Peutinger, who, with ardent zeal, instantly became absorbed in the almost illegible characters of his young comrade in learning. Wilibald Pirckheimer and Lienhard Groland also frequently forgot the fresh salmon and young partridges, which were served in succession, to share this brilliant novelty. The Abbot of St. AEgidius, too, showed his pleasure in the fortunate discovery, and did not grow quieter until the conversation turned upon the polemical writing which Reuchlin had just finished. It had recently appeared in Frankfort under the title: The Eye Mirror, and assailed with crushing severity those who blamed him for opposing the proposal to destroy the books of the Jews.
"What in the world do we care about the writings of the Hebrews?" the deep bass voice of Hans von Obernitz here interrupted the conversation. "A new Latin manuscript—that I value! But has this noble fragment of Tacitus created half as much stir as this miserable dispute?"
"There is more at stake," said Lienhard Groland positively. "The Jewish writings merely serve as a pretext for the Cologne inquisitors to attack the great Reuchlin. He, the most profound and keenest student of the noble Greek tongue, who also forced the venerable language in which the Old Testament speaks to discourse to us Germans—"
"The Hebrew!" cried Hans von Obernitz impatiently, passing his napkin over his thick moustache; "what do we want of it? How can a sagacious man plunge into such annoyances on its account?"
"Because the excess of liberty which you gentlemen grant to the human intellect blinds him," observed the abbot. "His learning would throw the doors wide open to heresy. The Scriptures are true. On them Tungern and Kollin, whom you mention, rely. In the original Hebrew text they will be given up to every one who wishes to seek an interpretation——"
"Then a new bridge will be built for truth," declared the little Thuringian with flashing eyes.
"The Cologne theologians hold a different opinion," replied the abbot.
"Because the Grand Inquisitor and his followers—Tungern, Kollin, and whatever the rest may be called—are concerned about some thing very different from the noblest daughter of Heaven," said Lienhard Groland, and the other gentlemen assented. "You yourself, my lord abbot, admitted to me on the ride here that it angered you, too, to see the Cologne Dominicans pursue the noble scholar 'with such fierce hatred and bitter stings.'"—[Virgil, Aeneid, xi. 837.]
"Because conflict between Christians always gives me pain," replied the abbot.
But here Dr. Eberbach impetuously broke in upon the conversation:
"For the sake of a fair woman Ilion suffered unspeakable tortures. But to us a single song of Homer is worth more than all these Hebrew writings. And yet a Trojan war of the intellect has been kindled concerning them. Here freedom of investigation, yonder with Hoogstraten and Tungern, fettering of the mind. Among us, the ardent yearning to hold aloft the new light which the revival of learning is kindling, yonder superior force is struggling to extinguish it. Here the rule of the thinking mind, in whose scales reason and counter-argument decide the matter; among the Cologne people it is the Grand Inquisitor's jailers, chains, dungeons, and the stake."
"They will not go so far," replied the abbot soothingly. "True, both the front and the back stairs are open to the Dominicans in Rome."
"Yet where should humanism find more zealous friends than in that very place, among the heads of the Church?" asked Dr. Peutinger. "From the Tiber, I hope——"
Here he paused, for the new guest who had just entered the room attracted his attention also. The landlord of The Blue Pike respectfully preceded him and ushered him directly to the Nuremberg party, while he requested the Dominican monks who accompanied him to wait.
The late arrival was Prof. Arnold von Tungern, dean of the theological faculty at the University of Cologne. This gentleman had just been