Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/18

 Among the students in whose classical education he had so gladly shared, Rudolph Agricola was the one who laboured most fruitfully in his footsteps.

After a long period of intellectual torpor a new era of healthy and joyous development had now begun in Germany. The thirst for education was felt by all classes, and no exertion was spared to raise the standard of the schools; new ones were established and old ones were improved.

Almost inexhaustible seemed the wealth of great and noble and strongly marked individualities who, in their schoolrooms and lecture-halls, as well as in the seclusion of their studies, imparted to learning and to art the leaven of spiritual life—teachers with whom 'the fear of the Lord was the beginning of wisdom,'