Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 3 / Essays on Literature, Biography, and Antiquities

CHIPS FROM A GERMAN WORKSHOP
F. MAX MÜLLER, M. A.,
FOREIGN MEMBER OF THE FRENCH INSTITUTE, ETC.
VOLUME III.
ESSAYS ON LITERATURE, BIOGRAPHY, AND ANTIQUITIES.
NEW YORK:
CHARLES SCRIBNER AND COMPANY.
1871.


The invention of printing was in itself a reformation, and its benefits were chiefly felt by the great masses of the people. The clergy possessed their libraries, where they might read and study if they chose; the castles contained collections of MSS., sacred and profane, illuminated with the most exquisite taste; while the citizen, the poor layman, though he might be able to read and to write, was debarred from the use of books, and had to satisfy his literary tastes with the sermons of travelling Franciscans, or the songs of blind beggars and peddlers. The art of printing admitted that large class to the same privileges which had hitherto been enjoyed almost exclusively by clergy and nobility: it placed in the hands of the third estate arms more powerful than the swords of the knights, and the thunderbolts of the priests: it was a revolution in the history of literature more eventful than any in the history of mankind. Poets and philosophers addressed themselves no longer to emperors and noblemen, to knights and ladies, but to the people at large, and especially to the middle classes, in which henceforth the chief strength of the nation resides.
The years from 1450 to 1500 form a period of preparation for the great struggle that was to inaugurate the beginning of the sixteenth century. It was an age “rich in scholars, copious in pedants, but poor in genius, and barren of strong thinkers.” One of the few interesting men in whose life and writings the history of that preliminary age may be studied, is Sebastian Brant, the famous author of the famous “Ship of Fools.”