Did revise me Sebastian Brant,
And industriously me corrected,
And into German much translated,
That now is to be found in me
Which will give joy to every reader;
Now, who uses me aright,
And plants me well, reward shall have.”
The prayer Anima Christi is found in some editions. A book called The Mirror of the Sinner went through five editions from 1480 to 1510, which Pastor John Geffcken has most impartially and fully criticised in his history of catechetical instruction in the fifteenth century. The Ten Commandments was the title of two books printed at Venice by an Augsburg printer in 1483, and Strassburg in 1516, and a Manual for Preparation for Holy Communion, several times reprinted at Basle, has suggested this praise from Herzog, the biographer of John Œcolampadius: “It breathes the purest and noblest devotion (mystik); we shall seldom find a communion-book penetrated with such a glow of devotion”; if we had any room left for quotation, this judgment would be found fully deserved. Manuals for the sick and dying were also widely used; three of 1483, 1498, and 1518, and one without date, are given in Panzer’s catalogue. The Garden of the Soul also contains a long passage on the fit preparation for death; and other books have special prayers for the same circumstances. That we are apt to see but one side of any question, and that false impressions unluckily in the popular mind chiefly avail themselves of the axiom that “possession is nine points of the law,” Jacob Grimm very appositely complains in the preface to his Antiquities of German Jurisprudence. “What is the use,” he says, “of the poetry being now discovered which presents the joyous vitality of life in that time (the middle ages) in a hundred touching and serious representations? The outcry about feudalism and the right of the strongest is still uppermost, as if, forsooth, the present had no injustice and no wretchedness to bear.”
DANTE’S PURGATORIO.
TRANSLATED BY T. W. PARSONS.
CANTO SIXTEENTH.
‘Drizza (disse) ver me l’acute luci