I beg you to listen to a patient stating of the case.  It is not without precedent.  When you were at Worms, in Germany, do you remember in the Luther Memorial the superb figure of Reuchlin, on one of the outer corners?  One or two of the statues may be somewhat grander, but no other seemed to me so handsome, as it stood colossal on its pillar, the scholar’s gown falling from the stately shoulders, and the face so fine there in the bronze, under the abundant hair and cap.  Reuchlin is said to be the proper founder of the German drama.  Before his time there had been, to be sure, some performing of miracle-plays, and perhaps things of a different sort.  The German literary historians, however, make it an era when Reuchlin came as professor to Heidelberg, and, in 1497, set up a stage, with students for actors, at the house of Johann, Kaemmerer von Dalberg.  He wrote his plays in Latin.  If you wish, I can send you their titles.  Each act, probably, was prefaced by a synopsis in German, and soon translations came into vogue, and were performed as well.  On that little strip of level which the crags and the Neckar make so narrow, collected then, as now, a fair concourse of bounding youth.  One can easily fancy how, when the prototypes of the trim Burschen of to-day stepped out in their representation, the applause sounded across to the vineyards about the Heiligenberg and Hirschgasse, and how now and then a knight and a dame from the court of the Kurfuerst came down the Schlossberg to see it all.  What Reuchlin began, came by no means to a speedy end.  In the Jesuit seminaries in Germany, in Italy too, and elsewhere, as the Reformation came on, I find the boys were acting plays.  This feature in the school was held out as an attraction to win students; and in Prague the Fathers themselves wrote dramas to satirise the Protestants, introducing Luther as the comic figure.  But what occurred in the Protestant world was more noteworthy.  As the choral singing of the schoolboys affected in an important way the development of music, so the school-plays had much to do with the development of the drama.  Read Gervinus to see how for a century or two it was the schools and universities that remained true to a tolerably high standard, while in the world at large all nobler ideals were under eclipse.  It was jocund Luther himself who took it under his especial sanction, as he did the fiddle and the dance, in his sweet large-heartedness finding Scriptural precedents for it, and encouraging the youths who came trooping to Wittenberg to relieve their wrestling with Aristotle and the dreary controversy with an occasional play.  Melancthon, too, gave the practice encouragement, until not only Wittenberg, but the schools of Saxony in general, and Thuringia, whose hills were in sight, surpassed all the countries of Germany in their attention to plays.  In Leipsic, Erfurt, and Magdeburg comedies were regularly represented before the schoolmasters.  But it was at the University