of a halt upon a journey, he prowled round the libraries of the town; and in one discovered this treatise of Lupold, which pleased him greatly.  As he was to be off again next morning, there was no time to have it copied, at least by one hand:  so the manuscript was cut up and distributed among a number of scribes, and in the space of a night the desired copy was ready.  Subsequently Wimpfeling heard of the incident from one of the brethren in the monastery, and obtained the original manuscript to publish.  When such things could happen, no wonder that some manuscripts are imperfect and others have disappeared.

Wimpfeling’s next endeavour to assert the glories of Germany was completed in 1502; but did not appear till 1505.  It was based upon the work of a friend, Sebastian Murrho of Colmar (d. 1494).  The title, Defensio Germaniae or Epithoma Germanorum, sufficiently explains its purpose.  After a brief account of Germany in Roman times—­his hero being not Arminius, but ’the first German king, Arioviscus, who fought with Julius Caesar’,—­and fuller records of the Germanic Emperors since Charlemagne, Wimpfeling comes to the praise of his own days; the men of learning, the famous soldiers, the architects who could build the great tower of Strasburg, the painters, the inventors of printing and of that terrible engine the bombard.  But nearest to his heart lay a question debated then as now:  to whom should rightfully belong the western part of the Rhine valley, between the river and the Vosges?  It was there that his home lay, Schlettstadt, one of the fairest cities of the plain.  With all the ’zeal and fervour of the ancient German princes’ he sets out to prove that it must be German:  ‘where are there any traces’ he cries ’of the French language?  There are no books in French, no monuments, no letters, no epitaphs, no deeds or documents.  For seven or eight centuries there is nothing but Latin or German.’  The cathedral of Spires, the fine monastery of St. Fides in his native town, supply him with a further argument:  would the good Dukes of Swabia have lavished so much money, the substance of their fathers, upon Gallic soil, to pour it out among the French?  With such arguments he convinced himself and others.  Almost at the same time Peutinger put out a little volume of ’Conversations about the wonderful antiquities of Germany’; supporting Wimpfeling with further evidence and concluding satisfactorily that French had never ruled over Germans.

A work of very different calibre which appeared about this time was the Germaniae Exegesis of Francis Fritz, who Latinized his name into Irenicus.  Wimpfeling was growing grey when he had made his defence of Germany:  the new champion was a young man of 23, who had scarcely emerged from his degree.  The book was published in 1518; printed at Hagenau by Anshelm at the cost of John Koberger, the great Nuremberg printer, and fostered by Pirckheimer.  In his later years Irenicus became a Lutheran and