384 Mr. A. W. Ward [March 8, 



which they referred. But the follies of youth may affect the welfare 

 of the community as well as of the individual ; and it was jyemialism 

 which brought German universities of the 17th century into a 

 contempt and alienation from the intellectual and moral progress of 

 the nation far deeper and more enduring than that which, from not 

 dissimilar causes, seemed to threaten the English universities of a 

 rather earlier age. FmnaUsm (the derivation of the word is obscure) 

 was the treatment administered to students during their first year by 

 their seniors. After, amidst tremendous mock solemnities, the beanvs 

 {bec-jaune, or freshman proper) had passed through the purifying 

 ceremony of the depositio (common), and transformed by the applica- 

 tion of scissors, file, saw and axe, he was depleted in purse by the 

 feast by which he had to pay for his admission into the academical 

 world. His first or penned year then ensued— a year of mingled 

 debauchery and tribulation, under the organized direction of his 

 seniors, and lucky he if he could pass on to the later stages of his 

 university career without a load of debt, a ruined constitution, and 

 perhaps a half-broken heart. There are phases of university Hfe 

 which have all the sordidness without any of the poetry of Yillon, 

 and from which even the historic observer may turn with disgust. 

 But if you remember that this was the time when some of the loftiest 

 minds were engaged in speculating on the purposes and methods of 

 education, proposing to themselves at times ideals so high that we 

 are prone to set them down as Utopias — if you remember that this 

 was the age (to mention two names only) of Milton and of Comenius 

 (whose final work was published in the last year of the War) — then 

 you will not wonder that in some of their contemporaries in Germany 

 doubts arose whether the universities could really be looked upon as 

 the true seats of high intellectual culture, and whether the training 

 of the country's youth might not more profitably be carried on 

 elsewhere. Such was the question asked by John Balthasar Schupp, 

 a pamphleteer who should not be overlooked by students of the 

 social history of the War. 



Of the German universities, that which had taken the lead in 

 cherishing the new birth of humanistic learning was Erfurt, whose 

 geographical position, as well as its relation to the archiepiscopal See 

 of Mainz, had forced it into the front of the religious conflict, and 

 thus brought about a decay of its academical prosperity which seemed 

 to be completed by the Thirty Years' War. The reason why I men- 

 tion it in the present connection is, that no less a personage than 

 Gustavus Adolphus made an attempt to restore to Erfurt, which 

 occupied a central position in Germany, not far from that portion of 

 it where he had actually established the seat of his own power as a 

 German prince, its former academical greatness, and promoted a 

 numlier of reforms which shortly after his death (1634) were 

 formulated in a new code. But the War made it impossible to carry 

 out these attempted changes, nor was it till a generation later — in 



