The rising German feeling expresses itself on all sides in the letters of the humanists.  A young Frieslander, studying at Oxford in 1499, writes to a fellow-countryman there:  ’Your verses have shown me what I never could have believed, that German talents are no whit inferior to Italian.’  Hutten in 1516 writes of Reuchlin and Erasmus as ’the two eyes of Germany, whom we must sedulously cherish; for it is through them that our nation is ceasing to be barbarous’.  Beatus Rhenanus, in editing the poems of Janus Pannonius (d. 1472), says in his preface, 1518:  ’Janus and Erasmus, Germans though they are and moderns, give me as much satisfaction to read as do Politian and Hermolaus, or even Virgil and Cicero.’  Erasmus in 1518 writes to thank a canon of Mainz who had entertained him at supper.  After compliments on his host’s charming manners, his erudition free from superciliousness—­if he could have known Gibbon, he surely must have used those immortal words of praise, ’a modest and learned ignorance’—­and his wit and elegance of speech, he goes on:  ’One might have been listening to a Roman.  Now let the Italians go and taunt Germans with barbarism, if they dare!’ In 1519 a canon of Brixen in Tirol writes to Beatus:  ’Would to God that Germany had more men like you, to make her famous, and stand up against those Italians, who give themselves such airs about their learning; though men of credit now think that the helm has been snatched from their hands by Erasmus.’  This is how Zwingli writes in 1521 of an Italian who had attacked Luther and charged him with ignorance:  ’But we must make allowances for Italian conceit.  In their heads is always running the refrain, “Heaven and earth can show none like to us”.  They cannot bear to see Germany outstripping them in learning.’  Rarely a different note is heard, evoked by rivalry perhaps or the desire to encourage.  Locher from Freiburg could call Leipzig barbarous.  Erasmus wrote to an Erfurt schoolmaster that he was glad to see Germany softening under the influence of good learning and putting off her wild woodland ways.  But these are exceptions:  towards insolence from the South an unbroken front was preserved.

In another direction the strong national feeling manifested itself; in the study of German antiquity and the composition of histories.[41] Maximilian, dipping his hands in literature, stimulated the archaeological researches of Peutinger, patronized Trithemius and Pirckheimer, and even instituted a royal historian, Stabius.  Celtis the versatile projected an elaborate Germania illustrata on the model of Flavio Biondo’s work for Rome; and his description of Nuremberg was designed to be the first instalment.  As he conceived it, the work was never carried out; but essays of varying importance on this theme were produced by Cochlaeus, Pirckheimer, Aventinus and Munster.  The most ardent to extol Germany was Wimpfeling of Schlettstadt, a man of serious temperament, who was