Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/142

 130 HISTORY OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE in short, that is of importance to the town — should be recorded, for the use of posterity, for instruction of the young, for the protection of freedom, and the preser- vation of the privileges conferred on the city by the popes and emperors. He earnestly exhorts the council to provide for the welfare of the city by the encourage- ment of learning and the erection of schools. In his enthusiasm for his country he tries to prove that the countries west of the Ehine had always belonged to Germany, and that the French could not, therefore, rightly lay claim to Alsatia. With the same patriotic ardour he wrote (1502), in a ' Sketch of the History of Germany down to the Present Time,' which he compiled from notes collected by Sebastian Murrho in 1502 : 'I am in a constant state of admiration of the old historians, not the later ones — who appear to me always as detractors. For being solicitous, in the first place, not to recount any- thing that is false ; and secondly, not to hide what is true in order not to be accused of being actuated by party prejudice or enmity, it is their habit, when speaking of the Germans, to record all their faults and vices, even the most trivial; but as to their virtues, they either pass them over altogether, or, if they allude to them, the evident reluctance with which they do so, and the withholding of the merited praise, diminish the effect. . . . But we are not ashamed of being de- scended from the Allemanni, whose glorious and admir- able deeds will be described in our book.' This work is the first general German history written by a Humanist, and, as far as accurate investigation goes, it falls far short of the works of an Irenicus or a Beatus Khenanus, but it gave a strong impulse to the serious