On his death-bed Wessel was assailed with scepticism, and began to doubt about the truth of the Christian religion.  But the cloud was of short duration.  That supreme moment of revelation, which comes to every man once, is no time for fear.  Patient hope cast out questioning, and he passed through the deep waters with his eyes on the Cross which had been his guide through the life that was ending.

Of Rudolph Agricola we know more than of the others; his striking personality, it seems, moved many of his friends to put on record their impressions of him.  One of the best of these sketches is by Goswin of Halen (d. 1530), who had been Wessel’s servant at Groningen, and had frequently met Agricola.  Rudolph’s father, Henry Huusman, was the parish priest of Baflo, a village four hours to the north of Groningen; his mother being a young woman of the place, who subsequently married a local carrier.  On 17 Feb. 1444 the priest was elected to be warden of a college of nuns at Siloe, close to Groningen, and in the same hour a messenger came running to him from Baflo, claiming the reward of good news and announcing the birth of a son.  ‘Good,’ said the new warden; ’this is an auspicious day, for it has twice made me father.’

From the moment he could walk, the boy was passionately fond of music; the sound of church bells would bring him toddling out into the street, or the thrummings of the blind beggars as they went from house to house playing for alms; and he would follow strolling pipers out of the gates into the country, and only be driven back by a show of violence.  When he was taken to church, all through the mass his eyes were riveted upon the organ and its bellows; and as he grew older he made himself a syrinx with eight or nine pipes out of willow-bark.  He was taught to ride on horseback, and early became adept in pole-jumping whilst in the saddle, an art which the Frieslanders of that age had evolved to help their horses across the broad rhines of their country.  In 1456, when he was just 12, he matriculated at Erfurt, and in May 1462 at Cologne.  But the course of his education is not clear, and though it is known that he reached the M.A. at Louvain, the date of this degree is not certain.  He is also said to have been at the University of Paris.

Of his life at Louvain some details are given by Geldenhauer (d. 1542) in a sketch written about fifty years after Agricola’s death.  The University had been founded in 1426 to meet the needs of Belgian students, who for higher education had been obliged to go to Cologne or Paris, or more distant universities.  Agricola entered Kettle College, which afterwards became the college of the Falcon, and soon distinguished himself among his fellow-students.  They admired the ease with which he learnt French—­not the rough dialect of Hainault, but the polite language of the court.  With many his musical tastes were a bond of sympathy, in a way which recalls the evenings that Henry Bradshaw used to spend among the musical