Butzbach was by temperament inclined to glorify the past; in the present he himself had a share, and therefore in his humility he thought little of it.  In consequence we must not take him too literally in his account of the condition of the school; but it is too interesting to pass over.  ‘In the old days’, he says, ’Deventer was a nursery for the Reformed Orders; they drew better boys, more suited to religion, out of the fifth class, than they do now out of the second or first, although now much better authors are read there.  Formerly there was nothing but the Parables of Alan of Lille, _fl._ 1200, the moral distichs of Cato, Aesop’s Fables, and a few others, whom the moderns despise; but the boys worked hard, and made their own way over difficulties.  Now when even in small schools the choicest authors are read, ancient and modern, prose and poetry, there is not the same profit; for virtue and industry are declining.  With the decay of that school, religion also is decaying, especially in our Order, which drew so many good men from there.  And yet it is not a hundred years since our reformation.’

He does not indicate how far back he was turning his regretful gaze; whether to the early years of the fifteenth century when Nicholas of Cues was a scholar at Deventer, or to the more recent times of Erasmus, who was about three school-generations ahead of him.  But of the books used there in the last quarter of the fifteenth century we can form a clear notion from the productions of the Deventer printers, Richard Paffraet and Jacobus of Breda.  School-books then as now were profitable undertakings, if printed cheap enough for the needy student; and Paffraet, with Hegius living in his house, must have had plenty of opportunities for anticipating the school’s requirements.  Between 1477 and 1499 he printed Virgil’s Eclogues, Cicero’s De Senectute and De Amicitia, Horace’s Ars Poetica, the Axiochus in Agricola’s translation, Cyprian’s Epistles, Prudentius’ poems, Juvencus’ Historia Euangelica, and the Legenda Aurea:  also the grammar of Alexander with the commentary of Synthius and Hegius, Agostino Dato’s Ars scribendi epistolas, Aesop’s Fables, and the Dialogus Creaturarum, the latter two being moralized in a way which must surely have pleased Butzbach.  Jacobus of Breda, who began printing at Deventer in 1486, produced Virgil’s Eclogues, Cicero’s De Senectute and De Officiis, Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae and De disciplina scholarium, Aesop, a poem by Baptista Mantuanus, the ‘Christian Virgil’, Alan of Lille’s Parabolae, Alexander, two grammatical treatises by Synthius and the Epistola mythologica of Bartholomew of Cologne.