Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/107

 UNIVERSITIES AND OTHER CENTRES OF LEARNING 95 Court of Brandenburg, wrote thus from Berlin to a friend, October 20, 1505 : ' Barely do we find here a man with any bias for learning ; through lack of educa- tion our people are mostly given over to feasting, drinking, and sloth.' Berlin did not possess a single printer before 1539, and it was not till one hundred and twenty years later that the first publisher settled there. It was in the provinces of the PJiine that intellectual life was most vigorous during the last thirty years of the fifteenth and the first decade of the sixteenth cen- turies. Here more than elsewhere the universities were in close touch with popular education, and rested on a firm basis of efficient preparatory schools. Amongst the Ehenish universities, Cologne ranks first both in size, importance, and distinction. It was the principal educational centre, not only for the whole district of the Lower Ehine, for Westphalia, and for Holland, but hundreds of foreigners also — from Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Livonia — flocked there to quench their intellectual thirst. It cannot be a matter of surprise that the leading educational institution should have been coloured with a strong religious character in a town in which there were nineteen parish churches and over one hundred chapels, twenty-two monasteries and con- vents, eleven chapter-houses, and twelve hospitals under ecclesiastical supervision, a town of which it was said proverbially that more than one thousand masses were daily celebrated there. The old scholastic method of study had uncircum- scribed sway in this university, but careful attention was at the same time bestowed on humanistic studies. The university records prove that the foremost among